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1250279003
| 9781250279002
| 1250279003
| 4.16
| 1,244
| May 12, 2022
| Jul 12, 2022
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it was amazing
| There is only one way out of this. The only way out of this outcome is that the November midterms are the final referendum on whether America truly st There is only one way out of this. The only way out of this outcome is that the November midterms are the final referendum on whether America truly stays America and a democracy or if it becomes a fascist dictatorship. If the Democrats lose the House and the Senate, then it is all over. There may never be another free and fair election in America. If the Republicans take control, we may be teetering on the edge of an American dictatorship. - from The Guardian interview-------------------------------------- There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call "The Twilight Zone." - One of several introductions used for the showIt does not take a lot of imagination to see what is happening in America today. They are coming for you. They are coming for your voting rights, your right to have your vote counted, your right not to be gerrymandered into a Jackson-Pollock-designed district that renders your vote moot, your right to be able to vote without having to stand on line for hours, your right to vote without having armed men and women watching you, intimidating you, your right to vote by mail, by drop box, your right to have someone bring your ballot to the election board if you are unable to do it yourself. They are coming for your right to privacy. An extremist religious SCOTUS whose members lied when they swore they would uphold precedent, reversed that very precedent and removed your right to do what you need, what you want, with your own body, blithely leaving hungry state foxes in charge of the abortion hen-house. They are coming for your money. Trump could not seem to do much to improve infrastructure, get us out of Afghanistan, deal with global warming or COVID, or seriously address any real public policy issues, but he managed to pass a massive tax cut for the wealthy and corporations. One guess who is supposed to make up that lost revenue. They are coming for the safety net programs that vast numbers of Americans rely on, while raising taxes on the middle class, on the working class and the poor. By Election Day 2020, the Trump-dominated Republican Party solidified itself for what it perceived was a battle to change the soul of America permanently. Trump’s financial backers saw endless opportunity for tax cuts and limitless, tax-free profits. The stock market saw a president who would ruin nearly a century of regulation and allow them unimaginable capital gains that they could pass on to their children without paying taxes. The party investors saw a middle and lower class that would pay for virtually everything Republicans wanted and divest from virtually every social program liberals wanted. In their eyes, the average American would see none of the profits of America but literally pay for the wealth and prosperity of the richest of the rich. In fact, Trump and his lieutenants managed to do precisely that in his first four years. By the end of his administration, money allocated for education, childcare, and mental health would pay for mega yachts. In Trump’s America, executive jet purchases were tax free.They are coming for your right to remain alive. Republicans have fought every attempt to enact sane gun control, untouched by the daily slaughter from these weapons. They are apparently just not that into you. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the rights and benefits that they want to take from you, from us. The right to marry, to love who you want, the right to define for yourself, and not allow the government to define your gender. Yes, they are coming for inter-racial marriage. They are coming for your right to use birth control. And they will not stop there. You have not just woken from a dream in an episode of The Twilight Zone (TZ). This is the terrifying reality of America today. Forget the reality you know, or thought you knew. You have been dragged, or maybe you ran into it. (Some superstitions, kept alive by the long night of ignorance, have their own special power. You'll hear of it through a jungle grapevine in a remote corner of the Twilight Zone. - from episode 3.12 - The Jungle) [image] Malcolm Nance - image from Macmillan Malcolm Nance is an intelligence professional, who has been dealing with foreign enemies for decades. What he has seen in analyzing terrorism and insurgencies abroad has given him a unique insight into what is now an ongoing domestic insurgency, an insurgency that is the means by which the fascist Republican right will take what it wants from you. They will try to win elections, and will win many, some fairly. But they will try to win by cheating, wherever playing fair will not get the job done. Once in office they will steal your rights, and legislate permanence to their position. What they cannot win at the ballot box, they will try to seize at the end of a gun. He calls this movement TITUS, for the Trump Insurgency in the United States. If you are among the remaining sane Republicans you might feel like the guy in TZ episode 1, who finds himself all alone in an abandoned town. [image] Earl Holliman as Mike Ferris in TZ episode 1, Where is Everybody - image from Do You Remember Nance presents a group-by-group look at the organizations involved in promoting and perpetuating chaos in our country, with the goal of seizing power. Many of these will be familiar. (Proud Boys, Three-Percenters, Oath Keepers Boogaloo Bois) Some were news to me. (e.g. Atomwaffen, the Base, Panzerfaust) He offers some history, showing how the bigotries of the past have persisted, albeit with some costume changes. He shows how the unspeakable monsters of the far right have gained increasing publicity from the right-wing media echo machine, and the main-stream media. And sadly, how the views expressed have found a home in a large portion of American households. He notes Trump’s rapid transition from distancing himself from the crazies to fully embracing them. No, this is not a Rod-Serling-generated fantasy land. The Proud Boys really are the khaki’d descendants of the skinheads. TITUS is a pre-rebellion political-paramilitary alliance that intends to use politics, instability, and violence to meet its goals. The number one goal is reestablishing the Trump dynasty as the primary operating system for America. Then they will use the power of the government to punish their enemies. The political wing of TITUS, the Trump-dominated Republican Party, has already initiated a dangerous plan to embrace the launch of protracted political warfare in America.Recent reports are that Trump even dreamed of having generals as loyal to him as Hitler’s were to Der Fuhrer, not realizing, because he is an ignoramus, that Hitler’s generals had tried to kill him on multiple occasions. It is pretty clear that this is not the only thing about Hitler that Trump envies. What we are looking at is a world in which there are people hoping to put Anthony Fremont into the Oval Office, again. You don’t remember Anthony? If you are a Twilight Zone fan you might. He was a monster, the star of one of TZ’s most famous, and chilling episodes. He was six years old, and lived in Peakesville, Ohio. Looks like a regular kid on the outside. But he was born with an unusual talent. He could make things vanish or rearrange them in horrible ways. He has already made all the world around Mar-a-Lago, sorry, Peakesville, disappear, and if you harbor any unhappy (UnMAGA?) thoughts he will do terrible things to you. The episode was called It’s a Good Life, taking its title from the ironic statement of an adult who knows it is anything but. Discussing the impeachment of President Trump on Meet the Press, Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado, said most members of the GOP are “paralyzed with fear.” He continued: “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues. . . . A couple of them broke down in tears . . . saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.This is what TITUS wants. [image] Billy Mumy as Anthony Fremont in It’s a Good Life, TZ season 3, episode 8 - image from NY Post Nance goes through what he calls the Psychodynamics of Radicalization, pointing out characteristics that well describe many on the right. They all see themselves as victims, are emotionally reactive, internalize negative stimuli until they burst, embrace conspiracy theories, have flexible ideological identifications (meaning there is no there there, any excuse will do to back up whatever it is they want, or are being told to do.) It goes on, but offers a fair description of many of the TITUS horde. There is certainly a lot of thinking inside the bubble going on, which leaves them with reduced capacity to think critically about the propaganda they mass-consume from the likes of Fox and Breitbart. [image] TZ Season 1, episode 22, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street - image from Noblemania – two aliens are amazed that simply by fiddling with a local electricity grid, they can cause the residents of this place to reveal their inner monsters and destroy each other One thing that I hoped would be addressed is the role Russia might have played, or is still playing in organizing or supporting some of these nut farms. Personally, I believe that Russia was instrumental in the creation of Q-Anon, but do not claim that to be a fact. It would be consistent with Russian cyber-war attacks against the West over the last few decades. There is a strong connection between Putin and disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who has been rumored to be “Q.” Nance might be in a position to have an actual informed opinion about who Q is. He does, however, offer a provocative scenario in which Q-Anon evolved from a live-action-role-playing game. An even more provocative scenario depicts a theoretical nation-wide assault on governments by the armed right. It is chilling. The violence of today’s right has been bubbling for a while. He reports on increasing white-nationalism in the police and military. The significance of this is that instead of bumbling amateurs trying to storm governors’ mansions, many of the assaulters will be combat trained, able to organize assaults, and comfortable using weapons. Military-style training camps have been increasing in number. Insurrectionist-oriented organizations joining together, or coordinating, can form a serious threat to the nation. Another huge threat is the propagation of lone-wolf terrorists, fooled by right-wing media lies into taking action against non-existent crimes. Remember Pizzagate? In its ability to inspire low-information followers to commit mortal acts of violence TITUS very much resembles ISIS. Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps.He also points out that the right has an advantage in camouflage. The January 6 insurrectionists were able to get as close as they did to the Capitol largely because they were white. Had a black mob of comparable size been breaking down barriers in DC that day, the response would have been very different. The whiteness of the assaulters allowed them to get close. Will that work in state capitols too, or again in DC? You will pick up some of the terminology used by the right, terms like accelerationism, ZOG, The Storm, zombies, sovereign citizen, constitutional sheriff, and plenty more. You will also learn about some of the books that inspire these folks. You may have heard of The Turner Diaries, but maybe not about The Great Replacement, by Renaud Camus, or Siege, by James Mason (no, not that one). They Want to Kill Americans is Malcolm Nance, with his hair on fire, trying to get everyone to see what is coming, pleading with us to take measures to forestall a bloody American insurgency. The book works in two ways, both as a warning of imminent peril, and as a resource. Use this book to learn who the relevant right-wing groups are, what they are about, who their leaders are, what their goals and methods are. There are many names named in this book. It would be good to learn as many of them as possible. Sadly, we are not in a dimension beyond time and space. We are in the dark place in which millions around the world find themselves facing hordes of fascists determined to destroy democracy as we have known it, substituting authoritarian rule. The threat is real, and unless we can fend it off we may never be able to find our way out of The Twilight of Democracy Zone. (with apologies to Anne Applebaum) …several Republican legislatures including in Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri have made the murder of protesters by running them over in a vehicle legal. Review posted – August 12, 2022 Publication date – July 12, 2022 I received an eARE of They Want to Kill Americans from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review. Thanks, Sara Beth and Michelle, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages The focus on his personal site at present is Ukraine, where Nance is working with the government to fend off the Russian invaders. Interviews ----- The Mary Trump Show - Malcolm Nance & Mary Trump: They Want To Kill Americans - VIDEO – 41:21 -----Malcolm Nance: ”The Republican Party is an insurgent party” - By David Smith -----Salon - Malcolm Nance on the Trump insurgency: Jan. 6 was a "template to do it correctly next time" by Chauncey Devega ----- The Commonwealth Club - MALCOLM NANCE: BEHIND THE IDEOLOGY OF THE TRUMP INSURGENCY - video – with Pat Thurston - 1:16:52 My review of another book by the author -----2018 - The Plot to Destroy Democracy Item of Interest -----University of Ohio - Twilight Zone Introduction -----Flux - ‘Once we take control’: Far-right broadcaster lays out his Christian fascist agenda by KYLE MANTYLA ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 06, 2022
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Aug 10, 2022
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Hardcover
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B098PDDZW3
| 4.09
| 19,018
| Sep 21, 2021
| Sep 21, 2021
|
it was amazing
| Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the govern Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the government to prevent the constitutional certification of a legitimate election won by Joe Biden.-------------------------------------- Milley summarized and scribbled. “Big Threat: domestic terrorism.”The title, Peril, is drawn from President Joe Biden’s inaugural address, in which he says “We have much to do in this winter of peril…” It is the epigraph for the book. Winter is not coming. It is bloody well here, and has been here a lot longer than most folks realize. Woodward and his much younger partner, Bob Costa, national political reporter for the Washington Post, look over some of what we have endured, consider the peril we face today, and give us plenty to think about concerning what lies ahead. Biden’s speech addresses not only the threat to our democracy, but the threat to our safety from COVID variants, the cry for racial justice, and the threat to our planet from global warming. This book focuses on the threat to American democracy. [image] Bob Woodward and Robert Costa - image from CNN It rolls along on two parallel tracks. One is Trump’s attempt to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election. The other is Joe Biden’s determination to preserve the soul of our nation, focusing on his campaign, and the first few months of his administration. The chapters alternate, more or less between Trump and Biden. “Was that from this book?” One peril to be faced in reading this book is that of fixing what one read, when, where, and by whom, given the firehose flood of books on the Trump era. I addressed that in my review of I Alone Can Fix It. If this is of interest you can click here for a look. [image] Trump’s mob assaults the Capitol on January 6, 2021 - image from Business Insider January 6, 2021 is a date which will live in infamy. That was the day on which American democracy was nearly bombed into surrender by a sneak attack on the citadel of our national values. That was the day on which a failed Trump-led coup could easily have made moot the election he had just lost, and rendered American elections, certainly presidential elections, meaningless. It was the coming out party for an American brand of fascism that has long been an undercurrent, and sometimes much more, in our political life as a nation, a dark but always-present element in our population that Trump had recruited and encouraged for years, even before he ran for office. It is clear that, to the extent that we will ever know all the details of the coup plot, it is likely to come from the Congressional January 6 Committee’s final report, in combination with unredacted testimony given to that committee, testimony given at what we hope will be very public trials of those in charge of the effort, and intrepid reporters. The authors count among that final group. While offering far from a complete portrait of the plot, they have given us an insider’s look at what people in the administration and the government beyond that faced on 1/6 (which I personally think should be called Desecration Day.) And what they had to deal with in the months leading up to it. [image] Milley speaking with Trump - image from DNYUZ It was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley whose intercession with his Chinese counterpart talked the Chinese military down from a concern that Trump might launch an attack on China in order to remain in office, not once but twice. As the Chinese were again concerned what our imbalanced president might do after his coup attempt failed. There was also concern that Trump would attack Iran in an attempt to secure his own position. I doubt Israel would have appreciated the incomings such an action would have surely generated. He also floated the idea of evacuating troops from Afghanistan in January, 2021, with minimal planning. Thankfully he was dissuaded from that impulse as well. Milley is the official most in the limelight here. He was appointed to that post by Donald Trump. In Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s book I Alone Can Fix It, Milley told them of his concerns about the dangers of a right-wing coup. There is plenty more of that in this book as well. We hear a lot from Trump-whisperer Lindsey Graham about his conversations with Trump, who appears to have actually convinced himself of the truth of his own lies. He is a fine representative of those who, while remaining loyal to Trump, try to counsel him to sane courses of action. [image] Donald Trump pretends to check his watch as Senator Lindsey Graham speaks at the White - image and text from The Guardian We get a look at the conversations among the cabinet level officials, unwilling to allow him to use the US military as his private army. We learn what analyses they shared about the dangers facing the nation, what agreements they came to among themselves, what steps they took, and what mistakes they made. We get a look at how these and other level-headed adults in the administration did whatever they could to keep Trump from causing irreparable harm to the nation with his impulsive-driven, self-serving, poorly-informed decision-making. Part of all this included making certain that proper chains of command would be followed should Trump decide to start a war as a Wag the Dog self-preservation move, or command the military to take actions that were illegal. Days after the election, Trump fired Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, in large part for his public opposition to the use of the military to suppress BLM protests. It was certainly clear to those tracking Trump’s actions that Trump wanted the US military to be his personal security force, and Esper was an impediment. In fact, it was appropriate for the military to be brought to bear to battle an insurrection, and the delays in the military’s response can be traced to the Department of Defense, by then Esper-free, sitting on its hands for far too long. [image] Defense Secretary Mark Esper – fired after the election - image from Reuters via BBC One item that becomes clear from the telling here is that Mike Pence did his best to find a way to Yes for Trump, but was unable. It is also clear that Trump pushed Pence a step too far when he issued a press release claiming that the Vice President agreed with Trump’s lie that the VP had the legal right to refuse to accept the electoral votes of any state. It was the only thing, apparently, in four years in office, that generated a spine in the relentlessly invertebrate Pence, driving him into bunker mode. It is unfortunate that Pence will likely be remembered more for this single act than for his years of pathetic subservience to and enabling of an American Mussolini. It is chilling to consider that had there been alternate slates of electors ready to bring to bear, Pence might have actually done the deed. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi called him repeatedly after the insurrection, wanting him to invoke the 25th amendment. He refused to take their calls, calling a quick halt to his vertebrate moment. [image] Mike Pence flees the mob on 1/6 - image from The Guardian The book will (it certainly should) make your blood boil. The Founders put together a guiding document and a set of rules that presumed they would be carried out by honorable officials. They did not count on the possibility of a sociopath being elected president. Someone with not only no respect, but outright contempt, for the rule of law. He really claimed, and maybe even believed in his diseased mind, like Louis XIV, who famously said “L’etat est moi,” that he, personally, was the state. Bottom line is that when you see Woodward and Costa being interviewed about this book, or talking about the events they covered, their hair is on fire. They understand what it was that happened, namely that not only did the nation narrowly avoid a fascist coup that would have made the USA a dictatorship, but that the party of the guy who ordered it is all lined up and ready to goose-step their way to another try. We may have survived Trump’s 2021 coup attempt, but it is clear that he will try again, and there are far too many who are more than willing to go along, whether actively or passively. [image] Trump with Steve Bannon - image from CNN Now, as for the other part of this book. It should come as a salve for the angst generated by the reporting on Trump. They follow Biden’s decision to run, following the Charlottesville “good people on both sides” outrage, convinced that the very soul of the nation was imperiled, and that he could offer a way out of this very dark cloud, more so than other extant or potential candidates. We get to see a very human Biden, sincere, knowledgeable, willing to listen to well-informed and well-meant advice, willing to make needed adjustments, willing to talk to anyone, anywhere, and unwilling to be baited by Trumpian taunts and lies. We are let in to some of the family troubles the Bidens have endured, that they continue to endure. Biden is shown as the anti-Trump, an incredibly decent person, gifted at making personal contact with people, caring about people, remembering them, willing to spend unheard of amounts of time with people who could offer him nothing but their shared pain. It shows candidate Biden behaving in a presidential manner when the actual president would not. It is a warm portrait of a man the authors have certainly seen enough of to know. They also show him getting tough in legislative negotiations, and showing his exasperation when sanity, and decency, seem insufficient to accomplish a goal. The book continues into March 2021, so shows Biden as president as well as merely a candidate. But, of course, being Washington reporters, they feel it necessary to take a swing or two. In one instance they report on Biden snapping at a reporter who was being particularly dickish as if there was something wrong with that. That Biden later apologized was the real fault here. The reporter merited being smacked down. Their portrayal was that this was a kind of gaffe. Take a moment to roll your eyes here. The Beltway media have particular story lines that they adhere to, regardless of the facts. Reporting Biden as particularly gaffe-ridden is among them. He is no more so than most other people. We all misstate things at times. But they seem eager, drooling even for a chance to catch another one and reinforce the image. Their treatment of Biden’s entirely appropriate reaction to a hostile reporter is of a cloth with that mindlessness. [image] Presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden takes a picture with the Downs family after campaigning in Rehoboth Beach. - image and text from the Cape Gazette Gripes (in addition to the one above) As happens far too often in books of this sort, namely political history books put together largely through personal interviews, the authors sometimes slip into stenography mode. They report, presumably straight-faced, about Senate Majority, now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell trotting out his spin about tax cuts for the rich being “tax reform” and crediting Trump for an economy that had been humming along quite nicely when he took office. I call BS. They continue in this mode about McConnell working with cabinet members trying to push Trump to some semblance of normal. Take nothing McConnell reports himself saying at face value. Second-party confirmation is always needed there. Ditto for Lindsey Graham. Former Republican and Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt issued a statement about Graham…saying that many people have tried to understand Graham over the years. He encouraged people not to look at it "through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things he used to believe and what he's doing now."Graham is quoted at length here, and it is all self-serving. Douse that with salt before consuming. Gripes, notwithstanding, Peril is an important book, another in a large library of reporting on the workings of the Trump administration, and particularly at how close Trump’s attempted coup came to succeeding. There are many lessons to be learned here. One is that the January 6th Committee should interview, whether via subpoena or not, all the players involved in orchestrating the insurrection, including Trump, and that they need to complete their report and make all necessary criminal referrals to the Department of Justice before Republicans have a chance to regain control of the House and shut them down. We learn that the norms and rules of American government are fatally flawed, allowing the dark-hearted to game the system for their political and personal advantage. We learn that even in dark times there are officials willing to put their careers, and even their lives on the line to stand up for the ideals and institutions, that Americans claim to admire and respect. We learn that there need to be fixes made to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to make sure that each state’s electors truthfully represent the decision of the voters. [image] Attorney John Eastman, left, speaks next to Rudy Giuliani at Donald Trump’s rally on 6 January - Image and text from Reuters, by way of The Guardian – photo by Jim, Bourg The book’s epigraph cut short Biden’s inaugural statement. The full sentence reads We will press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and possibility. Despite the subsequent COVID variants that have killed or damaged so many in our nation, and the world, a major relief bill made it through a very marginally Democratic Congress. Other measures are needed, but hope that more can be done remains alive, despite Joe Manchin. There are hopeful signs in many parts of the nation that democracy is on the rise… [image] Hmmm, reviewus interruptus. Looks like we have run out of space here on Goodreads. Despair not, the full review, including EXTRA STUFF, is on my site, Coot’s Reviews. See you there. [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 05, 2021
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Dec 27, 2021
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Dec 27, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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0593298942
| 9780593298947
| 0593298942
| 4.39
| 10,314
| Jul 20, 2021
| Jul 20, 2021
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really liked it
| Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who worked in Lyndon Johnson’s White House and closely studied many presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, said, “I Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who worked in Lyndon Johnson’s White House and closely studied many presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, said, “I have spent my entire career with presidents and there is nothing like this other than the 1850s, when events led inevitably to the Civil War.-------------------------------------- Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II,” Milley told them. “Everyone in this room, whether you’re a cop, whether you’re a soldier, we’re going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”I did not intend to write a full review for this one. It came out in July. I did not start reading it until August, and did not finish reading it until late September. That is what happens when I read a book on my phone, in addition to the two I am usually reading, one at my desk and the other at bedtime. But I was going to offer a few thoughts. Typed a line or two and then my fingers started pounding away at the keyboard pretty much all on their own. I astral projected myself to the kitchen to whip up a sandwich, make some tea and when I returned they were still banging away. I am sure there is a lesson in there about compulsion. [image] Phil Rucker and Carole Leonnig - image from Porter Square Books There have been, currently are, and no doubt will continue to be many books written about the Trump years. I Alone Can Fix It tracks the final year of Trump’s presidency, notes that he had faced no major problems until 2020, and then proved incapable of managing the ones that presented, seeking only his own aggrandizement, while clinging to power at all costs. If you read books of this sort all the time, if you read The Washington Post, The New York Times, or other world newspapers, watch CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and other at-least-somewhat-responsible news sources, much of what is in this book will not be all that surprising. In tracking Trump’s 2020+, I Alone Can Fix It offers inside looks at the actions and discussions, the conflicts and challenges inside the White House, almost day-by-day. Much that is detailed here has been reported before. And a lot of the new material has been outed in leaks to newspapers and TV political shows. Interviews with the authors chip away even more at the new-ness of the material, if you are coming to it any time after its initial week or two of release. Trump’s rash and retaliatory dismissal of [Acting DNI Joseph] Maguire would compel retired Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to write: “As Americans, we should be frightened—deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security—then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.“I am betting it is not news to you, for example, that when 1/6 was happening, Liz Cheney screamed at Trump toady Jim Jordan (who, as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University, had participated in a coverup of sexual abuse of wrestlers within the program) “Get away from me. You fucking did this.’” Or that Trump wanted to use the army to put down demonstrations in American cities. Or that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley was concerned that Trump wanted to use the American military to keep himself in office. Carol Leonnig (National investigative reporter focused on the White House and government accountability) at the Washington Post and Phil Rucker (Washington Post White House Bureau Chief) are top tier political reporters. They sat with many of the principals in the administration, including Trump, and amassed a vast store of materials in pulling this tale together. It is a horror story. In doing so they have unearthed considerable detail that did not make it to the pages of daily reporting. It is a portrayal of Donald Trump as someone who is generally disinterested in the well-being of the nation, concerned only for himself, which comes as a surprise to exactly no one with eyes to see and an ability to reason. I take issue with the clearly self-serving nature of some of the interviews. Spinners are gonna spin and twirling is the name of the game in Washington politics. Bill Barr, for example, attests to his devotion to the law. How Leonnig and Rucker allowed such tripe into the book is beyond me. This from a guy who routinely politicized the Department of Justice to subvert justice, seek punishment of Trump enemies (otherwise known as truth-tellers) and neglect to trouble those accused and even convicted of crimes. Puh-leez. He also pretends that he was practically dragged from retirement to serve as AG when, in fact he had actively campaigned for the job. Sure wish they would have called him out on that steaming pile of poo. Esper, Milley, and Barr—were tracking intelligence and social media chatter for any signs of unrest on Election Day. They and their deputies at the Pentagon, Justice Department, and FBI were monitoring the possibility of protests breaking out among supporters on both sides. The trio also were on guard for the possibility that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act in some way to quell protests or to perpetuate his power by somehow intervening in the election. This scenario weighed heavily on Esper and Milley because they controlled the military and had sworn an oath to the Constitution. Their duty was to protect a free and fair election and to prevent the military from being used for political purposes of any kind.Plenty more seek to burnish their records (the phrase polishing turds pops readily to mind) for history, eager to remove the fecal stench of attachment to the most corrupt administration in American history. I could have done with a bit more of Leonnig and Rucker pointing out for readers where the spinning ends and the truth begins. One of the heroes of this story is General Milley. Were his actions not confirmed by multiple other sources, one could be forgiven for suspecting that he was polishing his own…um…medals in reporting to Leonnig and Rucker his role in staving off Trump’s desire to use the military to suppress domestic dissent, and in working with other defense leaders, legislative leaders, and foreign military brass to help prevent what could easily have become a shooting war with China. But what he told them checks out. The man deserves even more medals, pre-shined. [image] General Mark Milley - image from New York Magazine One of the things that is most remarkable for its absence in this book is mention of Afghanistan. Really? That deal with the Taliban was not worth including? It makes sense, though. The MSM paid little attention to it when the deal was made, and largely ignored the fact that the actual Afghani government was not a party to the talks. They were more than happy, though, to jump on Biden’s back for implementing the shitty treaty by actually getting our troops out of an endless no-win war. Trump was rarely mentioned, and the awfulness of the deal, THAT TRUMP HAD NEGOTIATED, rarely merited serious coverage. Disappointing that Leonnig and Rucker seem to have skipped over this in their book. It was significant. It is an avocational hazard for those who consume political news in mass quantities that when there are so many books out about aspects of the same thing, namely the Trump disaster, it can be difficult to impossible to keep track of where particular stories originated. Also, each of the Trump era books is heralded in the press in the weeks leading up to publication with the juiciest bits from the opus du jour. The cacophony of revelations can make it impossible to discern the altos from the tenors from the sopranos from the basses. It all becomes one large chorus. Did I read about that in this book or that one, or that other one? Maybe I heard a piece about it on CNN, or BBC, or MSNBC, or one of the traditional network news shows. And no sooner does one finish one of these books that there are ten more peeping for attention like baby birds in a nest far outnumbering the worms their poor parents are able to scrounge. Thus, we get by with the news and political talk show interviews and daily early peeks at the books, hoping to be able to read at least enough of these things to get a clear picture. Like AI learning systems, there is a constant feed of information. At some point (although hopefully one has already achieved such a state) one internalizes the incoming stream, somehow manages to sort and categorize it, finds some sort of understanding and can use the collective intelligence to face new questions, problems, and situations with an informed base of knowledge, and generate a wise, informed decision, or opinion. At the very least we should have a sense of where to look to check out the latest claims and revelations. “A student of history, Milley saw Trump as the classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose. He described to aides that he kept having this stomach-churning feeling that some of the worrisome early stages of twentieth-century fascism in Germany were replaying in twenty-first-century America. He saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric of election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior.To that end, the Leonnig and Rucker book is a welcome addition to the ongoing info-flow. We live in dangerous times, and they offer some of the nitty gritty of how the sausage is made, how the perils are generated, and sometimes averted, who the players are and how they acted in moments of crisis. In the long run it probably does not matter if you heard the relevant information in this book, in a Woodward book (I am currently reading Peril) or in one or more of the gazillion others that have emerged in the last few years. What matters is that we get the information, that it is brought to us by honest, intelligent, expert reporters and/or participants, and that it is presented in a readable, digestible form. Leonnig and Rucker are both Pulitzer winners. Keep your eyes out for any irregularities, of course, but these two are reliable, trustworthy sources. Add their work to your data feed and keep the info flowing. We need all the good intel we can get to counteract the 24/7/365 Republican lie machine and to face down the next coup attempt. Knowledge is power. Acquire it. Learn from it. Remember it. Use it. Review first posted – 12/3/2021 Publication date – 7/20/21 [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the Carol Leonnig’s WaPo profile and Twitter pages Links to Phil Rucker’s Instagram, WaPo profile, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Face the Nation - "I Alone Can Fix It" authors say former president learned he was "untouchable" from first impeachment - video - 07:46 -----The Guardian - Inside Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year by David Smith -----Commonwealth Club - Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker: Inside Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year by Yamiche Alcindor – video – 57:01 -----NPR – Fresh Air - Investigation finds federal agencies dismissed threats ahead of the Jan. 6 attack - audio - 42:00 – by Terry Gross - more about Leonnig’s book Zero Fail but worth a listen Items of Interest -----NY Times - Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol- By Dmitriy Khavin, Haley Willis, Evan Hill, Natalie Reneau, Drew Jordan, Cora Engelbrecht, Christiaan Triebert, Stella Cooper, Malachy Browne and David Botti -----Washington Post - The Attack: Before, During and After - Reported by Devlin Barrett, Aaron C. Davis, Josh Dawsey, Amy Gardner, Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman, Peter Hermann, Spencer S. Hsu, Paul Kane, Ashley Parker, Beth Reinhard, Philip Rucker and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. -- Written by Amy Gardner and Rosalind S. Helderman -- Visuals and design by Phoebe Connelly, Natalia Jiménez-Stuard, Tyler Remmel and Madison Walls Items of Interest from the authors -----Washington Post - list of recent articles -----Washington Post - list of recent articles ...more |
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Sep 27, 2021
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Sep 29, 2021
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1324001550
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it was amazing
| [According to Jared Kushner] “In the beginning…20 percent of the people we had thought Trump was saving the world, and 80 percent thought they were [According to Jared Kushner] “In the beginning…20 percent of the people we had thought Trump was saving the world, and 80 percent thought they were saving the world from Trump. Now, I think we have the inverse. I think 80 percent of the people working for him think he’s saving the world, and 20 percent—maybe less now—think they’re saving the world from Trump.”-------------------------------------- Mattis summarized, “When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.”Bob Woodward has been reporting on American presidents for a long time. He and Carl Bernstein, reporters at The Washington Post, broke into public consciousness with their coverage of the Watergate scandal back in the early 1970s, culminating with their book, All the Presidents Men, one of the great political books of all time. In the intervening years Bob Woodward has continued covering politics in DC. He still holds the title of Associate Editor at the Post, but his production these days tends toward the long form. He has written 19 books since that first one. [image] Bob Woodward- image from The Guardian - photo by Christopher Lane In another collaboration with Carl Bernstsein, The Final Days, he wrote about Richard Nixon’s last year in power. Rage covers seven months of Donald Trump’s last year in office (unless the Donald manages to pull a coup out of a MAGA hat), so maybe The Penultimate Months, as of this writing. (November 2020, after Trump lost to Joe Biden) No talking to the presidential portraits this time. No excess consumption of liquid spirits. But, of course, one must always wonder what pharmaceuticals have been propping up the 45th president during the entirety of his term, so maybe. At least it is not something that is reported on or speculated about here. I am sure there will be more than a few reports, whether leaked to the press or included in memoirs, of Trump’s antics and gracious concession in the months after his electoral loss. Woodward had seventeen on-the-record conversations with Trump (that is what it says in the book flap, but on 60 minutes he says 18 and in the Axios interview he says 19) for this book, some in person, some by phone. “I call him the night prowler. I think it’s true. He doesn’t drink. He has this kind of savage energy and it comes through in some of the recordings I’ve released. It comes through in his rallies. So for me, it’s a window into his mind. It’s much like, as somebody said, the Nixon tapes where you see what he’s actually thinking and doing.” - from the Guardian interviewHe also had access to a vast range of official documents, and spoke with many others in the administration. While those conversations were conducted as “deep background,” it is pretty clear who made themselves available. Primary among these are Dan Coats, the erstwhile Director of National Intelligence, James Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, Rex Tillerson, the former Secretary of State, even Jared Kushner, still the son-in-law. One can expect that they all want to portray themselves in the best possible light. I rolled my eyes a lot, particularly, when Jared was handed the mike. Woodward concentrates on their interactions with Trump, leaving aside many other issues relevant for each. Woodward shows the extreme degree of disorganization in the administration governed by impulse, the chaos that is the Trumpian way. It had Mattis sleeping at the job, terrified of an imminent nuclear war with North Korea during the period when the boss was joyfully taunting Kim Jung Un as “Little Rocket Man.” Most impressive is the tracking of Trump’s reaction to the Corona Virus Pandemic from January to July 2020. This permeates the book, which opens with Trump being informed by his National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, on January 28, 2020, that Corona would be the largest national security threat of his presidency. Matt Pottinger, the deputy National Security Advisor, a China expert, had done some research with his contacts in China, and reported to the president about having been told by a Chinese expert ”Don’t think SARS 2003…Think influenza pandemic of 2018”, which killed 675,000 Americans. Trump waited three days to close travel from China, and continued to downplay the disease in public in the months ahead. Most of the outrages emanating from this book have had their time in the media. Playing down the significance of the Corona Virus is first among these, as Trump claims that he did not want to panic the public. Utter nonsense, of course. He was more than happy to panic the public with apocryphal reports of an invasive caravan of immigrants approaching our southern border, for example. More recently he has tried panicking suburban women by claiming that their nice, safe, white burbs would soon be overrun by “those people,” were Joe Biden to be elected. The public is nothing more to Donald Trump than a collection of marks waiting to be conned. The only things Trump cared about re the pandemic were how an increase in C-19 cases would make him look, and its potential impact on the stock market. Maybe co-first was the game Trump played with North Korea, noted above, that brought the nation to the brink of nuclear war. In talking about the BLM movement, Woodward points out to Trump that they are both privileged, older white men who have, in a way, lived in a cave, with limited ability to understand the experience of people outside their group. “No,” Trump said. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you,” he said, his voice mocking and incredulous. “Wow, I don’t feel that at all.”The establishment of the Mueller Investigation in May 2017 was hailed as a triumph of institutional integrity over venal self-dealing. Turns out, not so much, despite the holy aura vested in the probe by the mainstream media. In fact, it was a dodge. There was a real investigation that had begun in the FBI, led by Andrew McCabe, a die-hard Republican, looking into the connections between Trump, his campaign, and Vladimir Putin. McCabe was seen as being too straight a shooter to be trusted with this, so establishing the probe was a way to push him to the side. During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on June 28, 2018, Republican representative from Florida Ron DeSantis…remarked to [Rod] Rosenstein, “They talk about the Mueller investigation—it’s really the Rosenstein investigation. You appointed Mueller. You’re supervising Mueller.”And Rosenstein made sure, by establishing a rigid chain of command, that McCabe would be kept well out of the loop. One of the more interesting items in the book, one not covered much in media, was the notion of controversy as an accelerant for policy positions. ”Controversy elevates message,” Kushner said. This was his core understanding of communications strategy in the age of the internet and Trump.And Trump is certainly a genius (however unstable) at creating and sustaining controversy. Michael Cohen, in his book Disloyal, makes the related point that Trump has always had a genius for manipulating the media. One does not think of Bob Woodward as being a particularly funny guy, but one of the things I enjoyed about the book was Woodward’s wry commentaries after reporting. There are many of these. Here is a small example: I told him people I talked to were saying the presidential race between him and Biden was now a coin toss.another “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”Woodward is indeed a master at getting people to talk, not that Donald Trump needs much prompting, particularly when the subject matter is his personal favorite. But Woodward demonstrates impressive patience and perseverance in coping with an interviewee who seemed to have the attention span of a goldfish. This talent is one that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appreciated, in an interview with Mike Allen for Politico. "I think he's obviously a very astute journalist," Gates said to POLITICO's Mike Allen…"I would have really liked to recruit him for the CIA because he has an extraordinary ability to get otherwise responsible adults to spill [their] guts to him, on background, nothing there for the historians, but his ability to get people to talk about stuff they shouldn't be talking about is extraordinary and maybe unique." - from the Politico articleDonald Trump is an angry person. Always aggrieved, always looking to blame others for his failures, hurling invective and employing demagoguery to rouse an unanalytical base to support rank foolishness. Woodward opens the book with a couple of quotes by Trump about his capacity for inducing rage in people. It is certainly something at which he excels. But he remains clueless about how that works, which is no surprise, as Trump is clearly one of the least self-aware leaders we have ever had, hell, maybe one of the least self-aware people of his time. Here in November, 2020, as Trump does all he can to poison the democracy that elected him in 2016, as he does all he can to sow chaos in America’s foreign policy, as he does everything he can to seek revenge on government employees he deems insufficiently loyal, as he lies at an automatic firing rate that is impressive even for him, it is clear that along with disgust, the proper response to Trump is the one Woodward focuses on here. Rage will leave you more informed than you were before, but it will also leave you seething. If it does not, you are part of the problem. Review posted – 11/20/20 Publication date – 9/15/20 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Interviews -----The Guardian - The right man for the job: how Bob Woodward pinned Trump to the page by David Smith -----NPR - Interview With Bob Woodward, Part 1 by Mary Louise Kelly audio + transcript ----------Part 2 -----60 Minutes - Inside Donald Trump's 18 recorded interviews with Bob Woodward for his book "Rage" by Scott Pelley -----Axios on HBO - Bob Woodward: Full interview, Part 1 by Jonathan Swan My reviews of other books by the author -----2018 - Fear -----2010 - Obamas’s Wars -----2008 - The War Within Other books on Trump -----Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump -----Disloyal by Michael Cohen -----A Warning by Anonymous -----Tyrannical Minds by Anonymous -----Fascism by Madeleine K. Albright -----Trumpocracy by David Frum -----Unbelievable by Katy Tur There have been many books written about Trump and Trumpism, enough to warrant a shelf of their own. More particularly, there are two recent books, in addition to Rage, that have a lot to offer re getting a close, personal look at the man, Too Much and Never Enough, by Mary Trump, and Disloyal, by Michael Cohen. Both are well worth checking out. Items of Interest -----Washington Post - Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans by Robert Costa and Phil Rucker – This article includes links to tapes of some of Woodward’s conversations with Trump -----The Lincoln Project - Bloodlines ...more |
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Oct 02, 2020
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Nov 06, 2020
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Oct 02, 2020
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B0881YDNDD
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| Jul 14, 2020
| Jul 14, 2020
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it was amazing
| As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.So, you think your family’s nuts? Usually we have to wait for historians to delve back through the years of a president’s life, digging through letters and writings, interviewing any who might have interacted with them, checking their letters and writings, to cull relevant bits, suss out impactful events, discern motivations and understand how that president came to make the decisions he (still only he) made. Also, sift fact from spin or worse in former presidents’ memoirs and other writings [image] Mary Trump - image from Inside Edition It is quite likely that Donald Trump may be the most written about person, let alone politician, in modern American history. And despite his attempts, many of them, sadly, all too successful, to protect his information from the world, (still waiting on those tax returns) there are so many eyes looking his way, so many searchlights in the darkness, that details continue to emerge, daily, it seems. But there are few who have the sort of access available to a family member. Reporters and historians did not have the personal experiences of dealing with him in a household setting. His remaining siblings have their own reasons to keep their counsel, despite the odd secretly-taped statement that finds its way to the public arena. But we have something pretty close, if a generation removed. Not a sibling, but Donald’s niece, Mary Trump, daughter of the eldest of Fred Trump’s children, Freddy. She is not only a family member but a clinical psychologist to boot. While she was not present when Donald was a child, (he was 19 when she was born) she was as familiar as one could be with family who had been, and had personal exposure to him all her life, in addition to the many tales she heard from family members of Donald’s earlier days. The stories she tells paint a picture of how Donald came to be the person he is. She does not offer a hard diagnosis on how much might be genetic and how much nurture, but the implication is clear that it was a substantial mix of both. Whereas Mary [Donald’s mother] was needy, Fred [his father] seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a highly-functioning sociopath. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world.There are better sources for the details of Donald’s lifelong crime spree. What Mary Trump offers is a look into the poisoned tree from which this rotten apple dropped. One thing that stands out is that, even though Fred Sr encouraged all Donald’s worst qualities, there is rarely any sense that Donald had any positive ones beyond a superficial charm. In the Stephanopoulos interview, though, Mary talks about there having once been some kind inclinations in Donald, but they were squashed by his father. Even as a child, he delighted in bullying children smaller than himself, to the extent that Fred was encouraged to take him out of a school on whose board Fred sat. That must have been a fun conversation. Pop relocated Donald to the New York Military Academy, six miles north of West Point, in upstate New York. It was the equivalent of being sent to reform school for rich kids. A lot of the book focuses on Mary’s father, Freddy, the oldest of the siblings, the one expected to take over the business. He presumed he would be the head of his father’s company, but Pop never really gave him a chance, sticking him with relatively menial work. He was a kid who was kind, had friends, and interests other than his father’s business. This got him labeled as weak and a failure. Fred Senior preferred someone with what he considered a “killer” instinct, which translated into being as sociopathic as he was. He offered zero support for Freddy’s interest in flying, even though he had joined the United States Air Force ROTC in college and put in mad hours flying and training. Even after he secured a choice position as a pilot with TWA, the elite airline of the stars, flying their new 707 from Boston to Los Angeles, a pretty big deal at the time, his father regarded him as nothing more than a bus driver in the sky. But even after abandoning his flying career, and crawling back to his father, Fred Sr. never really gave him a chance at gaining any real authority. Donald, the second son, eight years younger, was more than happy to step into the favorite son shoes. He clearly had the temperament, the narcissism and malignant regard for others that his father so wanted to see in a successor. Mary offers some details on the business disasters that Donald wrought, his business talent pretty much as non-existent as his talent for dishonesty and self-promotion was vast. Even Mary bought into the spin for a long time, not realizing that Fred Sr. had been keeping Donald afloat with hundreds of millions in loans and often illegal gifts. It was when Donald asked her to ghostwrite one of his books that she did some actual research into him, followed him around, and realized just what a totally empty suit he truly was. There are plenty of quotes from this book making the rounds, a passel of stories. I will spare you the full list. But there are few things worth noting. ----------Donald’s disregard for women tracks with his father’s disregard for his wife, and even Donald’s dismissive treatment of her. ----------Donald even tried to steal his siblings’ inheritance, a ploy that was only sidetracked because Fred Sr was having a rare lucid day and smelled a rat, when his lawyer, whom Donald had recruited for this will-rewrite task, asked him to sign some papers. It was Donald’s mother who saw to it that the plot was foiled. ----------It is telling to see how Donald has recreated in his role as president the model set by his father for always keeping his children from any feeling of security. ----------He has inherited pop’s complete incapacity and/or unwillingness to accept any responsibility for his actions. But at some point you become responsible for yourself, and it is clear that whether he has the capacity or not, Donald never will. He will remain a spoiled child, a bully, a danger to anyone near him, and now, as someone with the instruments of national power at his disposal, an actual menace to the planet. One of the overarching feelings I had while reading this book was sadness. However awful Donald is today (and has been almost all his life), it is still a very sad thing for anyone to grow up in a household where a father’s love was not only unavailable, but in which even wanting such affection would be considered a sign of weakness, and cause for rejection and humiliation. Add to this a mother whose narcissism combined with physical illness to ensure that their interactions would be all about her, and never about him. Mary’s relationship with her grandmother, Donald’s mother, is also heart-breaking. Materials from the book are all over the print and digital media. The understandable focus there is on the actual content of the book. What happened, where, and when, what was said, by whom? How did Donald become so awful and what awful things has he done or said that we do not yet know about? Usually unmentioned, or maybe noted in passing, is what a bloody good read this book is. I found myself rapt while poring through it, and not just fascinated by the major multi-car pileup that is Donald’s life, but actually moved, particularly by the other main story Mary tells, that of her father’s demise. What a waste of a life, of an opportunity, and at the hands of madness. Trumps are not known for writing their own books. But Mary had an interest rarely, if ever, seen in the Trump family. It was love of books that set her apart when she was growing up… in what she describes as a “shitty Trump apartment” in the gritty housing projects of Jamaica, Queens, quite different to the rarefied air of the nearby Jamaica Estates where the rest of the family lived. That gave her a grounding in reality. She took the subway to school. And she devoured literature. In her memoir, she recounts that her grandfather’s house did not display a single book until her uncle published his ghostwritten The Art of the Deal in the late 1980s. “I started reading when I was three and a half,” Trump says. “My horizons were already broader than anyone else in the family simply by virtue of that.” - from the Financial Times interviewWhile Mary Trump does not have the objectivity of a true outsider looking at the family, that does not mean that she leaves her clinical toolbox unopened. She has a PhD in clinical psychology. She has observed and had reliable reports on a large swath of Donald’s life, and the lives of other family members, a solid grounding for offering a very well-informed, and analytically incisive, opinion about Donald and other family members. Her personal take on 45 is the best we are likely to ever have in terms of understanding the psychological roots and early journey into madness of our Psycho President. It is a frightening picture. We can only hope that we all get to live long enough to fully appreciate just how valuable it is. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York and currently the de facto leader of the country’s COVID-19 response, has committed not only the sin of insufficiently kissing Donald’s ass, but the ultimate sin of showing Donald up by being better and more competent, a real leader who is respected and effective and admired. Donald can’t fight back by shutting Cuomo up or reversing his decisions; having abdicated his authority to lead a nationwide response, he no longer has the ability to counter decisions made at the state level…What he can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is to punish the rest of us. He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently…What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder. Review first posted – September 10, 2020 Publication date – July 14, 2020 [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages Interviews -----ABC News – with George Stephanopoulos - George is a bit hostile, but it is a good interview overall -----Financial Times - Mary Trump: ‘At Least the Borgias supported the arts’ by Edward Luce -----The Guardian - Mary Trump on her Uncle Donald: ‘I used to feel compassion for him. That became impossible’ by David Smith -----Mother Jones - Watch: Mary Trump on Why Donald Trump Lies, Why He’s “Racist,” and Why She Wrote Her Book by David Corn -----MSNBC has chopped up Rachel Maddow’s interview with the author into bits. If I find a complete vid of that interview, I will add it here. Items of Interest -----Wikipedia entry for The Trump Family -----The Lincoln Project - Bloodlines ...more |
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Aug 24, 2020
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Sep 05, 2020
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Sep 05, 2020
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| 3.97
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| Feb 18, 2020
| Feb 18, 2020
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it was amazing
| With Trump in the White House there would presumably be extensive digging into every deal he’d ever done, every partner he’d ever worked with, ever With Trump in the White House there would presumably be extensive digging into every deal he’d ever done, every partner he’d ever worked with, every loan he’d ever received—many of which involved Deutsche. And the facts that Trump’s election was under a cloud because of Russia’s efforts to sway the vote and that his leading lender had for years been engaged in money-laundering activity in Russia—well, it didn’t take a genius to realize that real or imagined dots would soon be connected linking Deutsche to Russia to Donald Trump. This was especially true since the bank a decade earlier had connected Trump with wealthy Russians as he prepared to build resorts in Hawaii and Mexico.We all know that those much anticipated revelations have had scant time in the sun, but we also know that Deutsche Bank (DB) is where a whole bunch of the bodies are buried. In looking at DB, Donald Trump makes up only a small part of the book, but he is the tale that wags the dog in this biography of a bank. Donald Trump is a deadbeat, a con man extraordinaire. After getting massive loans from a range of New York banks, and stiffing them, resulting in massive losses, he was essentially blacklisted in New York. No reputable bank would lend him anything. Yet, as he announced his candidacy for the presidency, there was one financial entity still willing to do deals with him. How did DB get to a point where they were the only bank in the world that would lend money to such a complete fiscal lowlife. How could any bank make loans of billions of dollars to him and his family? [image] David Enrich - image from AirMail.News Enrich introduces us early to a key figure in understanding DB’s secrets. Val Broeksmit was the ne’er do well stepson of Bill Broeksmit, a reasonably ethical guy who had been called on multiple times to step in at DB and make sure things were being done on the up and up. When they were not, he let upper management know. This does not mean that his advice was always heeded. But there came a time when regulators were closing in, and a part of DB where he had particular responsibility had been doing business in an unacceptable way. He had missed it. Years of working at this mad company had taken a toll. He had retired or tried to retire several times, but, like Michael Corleone in Godfather III, he finds it is not so easy to stay out. The years of major stress and this final failing, his internalization of the stresses of the company, became too much. Bill hanged himself. (although Val thinks he was killed) Val managed to get his hands on considerable quantities of stepdad’s communications. How he uses this trove, and how it is used by others, researchers, authors, and government officials, forms a tranche that permeates the modern story of the bank. As an example of how greed turns good people turn bad, though, it is never made clear that Broeksmit had ever really done anything illegal or clearly unethical. Maybe it is more that this criminal corporation had destroyed a guy who was basically decent, who had the temerity to ask how bank actions might affect their clients. [image] Bill Broeksmit - image from The New York Post Enrich gives us a look at the bank’s beginnings in the 19th century, its later alignment with Nazis, as it removed Jews from its board and staff, its financing of the construction of Aushwitz, and its survival, after the war. The USA wanted the bank liquidated, but the UK wanted it around to help in paying the UK the war debts Germany had agreed to. [image] Val Broeksmit - image from the NY Times DB settled in to being a conservative bank, serving businesses, and scrupulously looking after their clients’ interests. But a new element entered as derivatives began to grow from a conservative way to hedge one’s risks to a form of casino gambling. DB looked to expand from its European roots to a global presence. They brought in people, from the USA and elsewhere, who had the expertise to establish DB in these new markets. [image] Josef Ackermann - image from The Irish Times - DB CEO from 2002 to 2012 – he led the huge expansion of the corporation It was wildly successful, even if the paper DB held, now that it was gambling with its own as well its clients’ money, might be wildly overvalued. DB had made itself into the largest bank in the world. Part of the success was because the top bosses demanded insane levels of growth. At one point it was expected that profits should grow 25% a year. In no sane world was this possible. But there were, however, insane ways to achieve the goal. Do business with dodgy characters with whom no one else wanted to do business, and charge them hefty fees for the privilege. People like Russian oligarchs, middle eastern royal families, and kleptocrats, were eager for ways to transform their local currencies into dollars or euros, and DB was more than happy to help. They were also willing to match eastern dirty laundry with western spin cycles, and thus were able to connect Russian officials busy looting their nation’s resources with, say, real estate developers in need of large cash infusions to pursue expensive projects, for a piece of the action. Legality was an unfortunate victim to such transactions. International sanctions were ignored. Adherence to fiduciary norms took a hit. The result was that DB eventually became known for the stain of its dishonesty with its own customers, and willingness to cut legal corners to sustain an unnatural level of growth. Neither did the Mad Max atmosphere at the bank do much for the people working there, except, of course, for those directing the crimes, who made off with staggering sums. Enrich tells the DB story by focusing on a series of individuals at the upper levels of management, offering not only a look at where they came from and what they did in their executive positions, but a take on their personalities, what made them tick, even, for some, their family lives. This approach is a common, but effective one, that succeeds in making the DB story not one of a glass-encased corporate entity (or, a person, according to Mitt Romney) but a human story, with some decent people, some bad guys, and some really, really bad guys. [image] The DB towers in Frankfurt – image by Krisztian Bocs for Bloomberg There are some fun bits in here that are likely to surprise you, like how Val and his trove of dad’s intel got connected with Adam Schiff by way of Moby. Mostly, though, Val’s doings seem sad rather than enlightening, but do offer a bit of a look at how difficult it can be, sometimes, for journalists and investigators to secure much-needed information, when the source is less than a standup sort. [image] Anshu Jain - Co-CEO of DB from 2011 to 2015 – he left as a result of the the Libor Rate-fixing Scandal - image from FirstPost.com By the end you will see how it came about that DJT had found a financial home with DB, and you will know what it took for a conservative institution to have totally lost its mind and evolved into a grand scale criminal enterprise. And you will be left wondering just how long it will take for the wheels of justice to grind their way to delivering actual justice to so many who flaunt the laws to the detriment of the rest of us. In the final months of the Obama administration, all signs had pointed to charges soon being filed against bank employees and probably the bank itself. At the very least, a multibillion-dollar financial penalty looked all but certain.Something curious, however, had happened as soon as Trump took the oath of office. The investigation had gone silent. Week after week, Deutsch’s lawyers and executives wondered when they would get an update. At first, they worried that the delay spelled trouble. Perhaps, after campaigning as a populist, after vowing that he was “not going to let Wall Street get away with murder,” Trump planned an aggressive crackdown on banking malfeasance. Perhaps, after having his election victory tarnished by Russian interference, Trump would try to dispel those suspicions with a high-profile assault on Russian money laundering. But as the months passed, and nothing happened, executives’ fears faded. One source of relief was the realization that two of the Justice Department’s most powerful prosecutors, Geoffrey Berman and Robert Khuzami, both had previously represented Deutsche…Bank executives soon concluded that Russia was off-limits, too hot to handle, for the Trump administration. So, it seemed, was Deutsche. Review first posted – February 28, 2020 Publication dates ----------February 18, 2020 - hardcover ----------December 16, 2020 - trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s GR, Twitter, Instagram and FB pages Interviews ----- Expected case against Deutsche Bank disappeared in Trump transition -----Rachel Maddow - Transcript of the entire show -----NPR - 'Dark Towers' Exposes Chaos And Corruption At The Bank That Holds Trump's Secrets - by Dale Davies Items of Interest -----Why are so many bankers committing suicide? -----NY Times – by Enrich - Me and My Whistle-Blower -----The Libor Scandal ...more |
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ebook
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0593137582
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| 1,485
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| Jan 14, 2020
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it was amazing
| Why this Book? To paraphrase the political scientist Liam Neeson: “I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that I acquired over a very long Why this Book? To paraphrase the political scientist Liam Neeson: “I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that I acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.” [image] Rick Wilson - image from Fast Company – photo credit - Celine Grouard Rick Wilson is the Don Rickles (Mister Warmth) of political punditry. They are both laugh out loud funny and extremely caustic. Rickles, who died in 2017 after a very long and successful career as a stand-up comedian and actor made his living by making people laugh while saying terrible things about them, to their faces. Wilson could probably have a career in comedy if he wanted one, but he has other ambitions. Thankfully they are not the same as his old ambitions. Wilson has made a career of advising Republican candidates for office, and working as an opinion writer. He advised Rudy Giuliani while he was mayor of New York City, and in his campaign against Hillary Clinton for Senate. He was a field director in George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential run. In 2002 he was a media advisor to Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss. In that campaign, he attacked Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who had lost three limbs to a grenade in Viet Nam, as soft on defense, dishonestly linking him with Osama bin Laden. He created an ad in the 2008 presidential race that attacked Obama for his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In 2014 he crafted a GOP ad that used hatred of Obama as motivation for voting against other Dems. In 2016 he worked for Carlos Cantera’s unsuccessful campaign for the Senate in Washington, and also worked for Marco Rubio in his successful Senatorial bid. His efforts have been characterized by negativity, delight in going after opponents with whatever weapons work, and a feckless disregard for the truth. In 2016, however, this paragon of virtue was among many Republicans whose tolerance for awfulness was pretty high, who found Donald Trump an unacceptable candidate, and became what we now refer to as a never-Trumper. Yeah, unfortunately, there was always a dynamic pressure inside the party. The fiscal people and the individual liberty people would keep the social conservatives from getting too out of control. The social conservatives would keep the fiscal people from getting too out of control. The foreign policy people, this tripartite internal, the three-legged stool they used to call it. Well with Trump, that all fell apart. It's all gone. It's all id. It's everything that's in their heads. They're told, "You can have whatever you want, we're going to burn it all down." And that's what they're doing. - from the Salon interviewThere are many who fit that description, Republicans who will never support Trump. Of course, these days, while some such folks remain Republican, a growing number have abandoned the GOP, as the party they loved has become the party of Trump, a cult-like organization that bears little resemblance, in their minds, to its predecessor. (See the link in EXTRA STUFF to The Lincoln Project, an organization of erstwhile Republican Never-Trumpers that seeks to help end the Reign of the Suntan King) These folks still support a host of policy positions that I, and most of my fellow and sister Democrats, find unacceptable, appalling, and often inhuman. Nevertheless, while we may flip birds and scream epithets at each other across a river, we share a common cause in not allowing that river to rise up like the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and destroy us all. Donald Jessica Trump (name variant courtesy of Randy Rainbow) is that flood and we need to make common cause with some of those awful people on the other side to prevent an existential catastrophe. While merrily hurling insults at Democrats, Rick Wilson, former GOP mischief-maker, current Never-Trumper, and really funny guy, now offers his acquired wisdom to Democrats. I recognize that the next two paragraphs (about 450 words) constitute an aside, so am tucking them under a spoiler tag to spare those who object to my leisurely pace. There is nothing remotely spoilerish here.(view spoiler)[I read this book in an unusual manner. Typically, I take in my primary read each week, whether paper or e-book, at my iMac, entering notes as I go along. My secondary book I read at bedtime, upstairs, anywhere from ten to twenty pages a night, most of the time, entering notes into a laptop or paper notebook. I had Wilson’s book on my radar, and on the family stack, but there was no certainty I would review it at all. It so happened that a long-awaited front door was being delivered on February 10. Had to get up early in order to take up guard duty. The work entailed required that the existing front door be removed, and would mean a serious security risk for the several hours the installers needed to complete the installation. Not a big deal for most of us. A bit chilly, perhaps, but putting on a few layers takes care of that. No concerns about home invasions. But we had considerable concern about one or more of our four-legged family members giving in to their native curiosity and making a dash for the exit. While it is possible to wrangle most herd members into rooms with doors that close with cat treats, there are always a few who are not so easily suckered. Thus, guard duty. I firmly planted my bottom on a chair near the front door, trying my best not to pay any attention to the oral garbage being spewed by the workmen’s radio. It was tuned to Rush Limbaugh’s show, and others of that ilk. The work took about six hours. Instead, I did my best to bury my consciousness in Wilson’s book. It was not hard. Wilson may still give off the brimstone aroma of a Republican political operative, but he is LOL funny. As much as he may insult members of my Democratic tribe, justifiably, regarding our campaigning skills, he saves most of his ordnance for Trump and his minions. Couldn’t help myself. Every now and again, I would begin laughing out loud, literally. My wife, working in the living room at the time, would pipe up “Rick?” To which I would respond, “Yep.” And then read her the passage of the moment. No note taking, digital or pen and notebook. I was just reading this to read it. It would be one of about ten to fifteen books I read each year with no intention of writing a review. But that changed. I managed to read all but one chapter during my protracted sit-down. Finished the final bit the next day. Knew I had to let folks know about this one. Now, counting heads…98, 99, 100, 101. Yep, they’re all accounted for. (hide spoiler)] The core can be distilled down to a few nuggets. Donald Trump is a menace to the nation we love, and we need to work together to remove him from the White House. Wilson can help, and he knows what he is talking about. The only real issue in the 2020 presidential race is Donald Trump, keep him or dump him. Those who are in his camp are not worth your time and energy. Ditto for those who are firmly against him. It boils down to fifteen states where the outcome is not already assured. Focus almost all your campaigning energy there. Wilson goes into detail about the best ways to attack Trump, both in the content of one’s media approach and in the need to tailor that approach to each locale. There is a lot to learn here about the details of the campaigning craft. Of particular interest was a breakdown of voters into “hidden tribes within the electorate.” Identifying where people fall in this sorting helps define how candidates might try to reach them. Q - If you were advising on the economy to these Democrats, what would you recommend?He talks about the horrific downside of a second Trump term, including the grooming of Ivanka and Don Jr to take over in 2024, the expansive corruption of all that is not already corrupt, the further degradation of the planet, and our remaining civil liberties, the jailing of his opponents, and more, none of it pretty. Wilson offers a list of Trumpian issues to focus on, depending on the location, corruption, misogyny and sexual aggression, paying off porn stars, kids in cages, alienating our allies while cozying up to authoritarians, and so much more. Hammer his ego, his declining mental capacity, weight, tiny hands, his actual net worth, his enslavement by Putin. And now his ongoing corruption of the Justice Department. Rick's theory is not (yet) endorsed by any Gallup poll. But it makes sense. So how would Rick hit Trump? "I'd hit him on his mental instability, because he thinks he's smart and sane and he's not. He thinks he's a remarkable communicator ... he's not, he's a 70-year-old asshole from Queens." Then Rick would go after his "reputation for wealth, which is unfounded in large measure, and that's a soft spot for him ..." A billionaire client of Rick's once said: "I'm a billionaire. Trump is a clown living on credit." So having real billionaires like Mark Cuban attack Trump in an ad would be an effective tactic. - from Cracked interviewWilson also offers advice that is fairly useless, urging Dems to start, before they can really turn their attention and their remaining funds to, going after the cheating Cheeto President. Not everyone is Michael Bloomburg, with, essentially, endless funds. (Mayor Mike entered the race too late to be considered in the book.) He urges Dems to minimize talk of policy. Again, this ignores the primary season. An ability to kick Trump in the nuts as needed is a talent to be admired, but there still needs to be some policy vetting by Democratic voters. I expect the central party is hurting for funds, (pure guesswork on my part) as most available contributions are probably going to candidates, so even the Democratic Party itself likely lacks the means to implement an attack-early-and-often strategy as soon as would be desirable. The book is divided into Six Parts. Within each part the chapters are introduced by what are frequently LOL short comedic pieces. Part One chapter intros are Tweets From Donald Trump’s Second Term, Part Two chapter intros are from White House Diaries: Melania Trump, and so on. A sample from Part One: @realDonaldTrump: some lying liberal media who are DFAILING BADLY and will soon be bankrupt like the Bezos Washington Post are reporting that Stephen Miller was arrested for making a suit from a woman’s skin and eating her. FAKE NEWS. He did NOT EAT HER! Stephen is doing a GRATE job!There are plenty of well-deserved shots taken at Democratic campaigners and some less-deserved snark directed at Democratic values and programs, but that is part of the package. Overall, this is one of those books that anyone involved in politics in any way should read. It is funny, profane, and wildly insightful and useful. Every Democratic political operative should have a copy and I expect to see those copies heavily dog-eared. For the rest of us, if you enjoy a good dose of laughter and cynicism with your political writings, this is the book for you. Wilson may be the demon spawn of Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, but he is one funny, smart sulfur-scented writer. His book not only explains what has gone wrong before but offers the tools to see why the political ads that bombard your TV and other screens are working or failing. We cannot afford four more years of the Turd Reich. Read this book! He will always be with us, to the end of our days, either as a warning or as a boot stomping on our faces, forever. Review first posted – February 21, 2020 Publication date – January 14, 2020 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below, in comment #1 [image] ...more |
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3.93
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| Nov 19, 2019
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liked it
| He was like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding a He was like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport. This was not how it was supposed to be.---------------------------------------- In the history of American democracy, we have had undisciplined presidents. We have had incurious presidents. We have had inexperienced presidents. We have had amoral presidents. Rarely if ever before have we had them all at once.Given the spate of news reports and exposés in newspapers, magazines, TV, and in social media, it is impossible to keep up, as the outrages revealed last week are topped by the revelations brought forth this week, which will, of course, be topped by the revelations coming out next week in the book by whichever former Administration official or government whistle blower is next up. What makes any of them any different from any other? We know that Trump lies incessantly, so it is no shock to anyone with a functional brain when yet another lie is shown to be just that. What makes this book different (and, having read only a few of these things, I may be omitting similarities to books I have not taken in) is the view, fueled by observation, of just how bad things actually are. In September, 2018, The New York Times published an op-ed by the author (I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration), which caused a stir. The notions expressed there were developed into a book, A Warning, which was published in November 2019. The administration was only a few weeks in, and already the mayhem made everyone look foolish. Internal whispers grew louder; This was not a way to do business. As a result, people who’d previously been outsiders to Trump World grew closer to one another and developed a bizarre sense of fraternity, like bank-robbery hostages lying on the floor at gun-point, unable to sound the alarm but aware that everyone else was stricken with the same fear of the unknown.The author, who purports to be a “Senior Trump Administration Official,” divides the book between references to classical sociopolitical looks at leadership, and his-or-her first-hand observations (and second-hand reports) of Trump’s behavior, with a bit of analysis of the groups and competing interests within the Administration. Anonymous looks at what the ancient Greeks considered the ideal traits of a leader, using Cicero’s De Officiis (On Duties) as the measure. Point by point, the author contrasts the qualities thought desirable in a leader to the traits of Donald J. Trump. Things like Wisdom, Sense of Justice, Courage, and Temperance. It will come as no surprise that Trump presents the exact opposite traits from what one would want. Duh-uh. But it is nice to see it spelled out in reference to a classic perspective. This is mostly a been-there, done-that listing of the awfulness of Trump, delineated by type and sub-type of awfulness. Yawn. In a more alarming reference, Anonymous looks at Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, a right-wing screed which sees in most state intervention in an otherwise unfettered (feral?) economy enslavement by the state. It is much loved by right-wing grad students, the same folks who read Ayn Rand with one hand. But there are some pretty good passages on totalitarianism, which is far likelier from the right than from the left, particularly in the USA. A quote from Hayek and some summaries of Hayek’s points sound just about right re what an aspiring autocrat needs: “He must gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own, but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”Of course, Hayek goes too far, an autocrat needs a group with questionable morals, which will also tend to be undereducatedSorry, this is pure class bias, presuming as it does that the well-educated, who tend to be wealthier, are of a higher moral character than the poorer, less-well-educated rabble. Are the Kochs well educated? The Republicans in the Senate? The thieves on Wall Street? The CEOs of oil and gas transnationals? If anything, the middle, working and poor classes might be said to be of superior moral quality to those in power, who often seem selected by their degree of disregard for everyone else. The primary benefit to reading A Warning is to get a “you-are-there” sense of just how much of an idiot Trump truly is. A man of unparalleled venality, inflated self-regard, uninterested in learning, believer that all knowledge is to be found inside his tiny brain, a thief, liar, life-long criminal, and legend in his own mind, convinced from birth that rules do not apply to him, and now empowered to surround himself with a rotating cast of sycophants who serve to reflect back to him his vastly inflated sense of his own infallibility. Quoting the Boss, Badlands, Poor man want to be rich. Rich man want to be king. And a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything. Continuing on, King wants to be god. It worked for the Roman emperors. It is not at all shocking that Trump is encouraging the lunatics who proclaim him the second coming. Without, of course, all that messiness on Calvary. Even for those of us who tend to regard him as the epitome of the inherent evil of entitlement-plus-money, it becomes quite clear that those in the asylum with him have a much darker view of his mental competence than the general public. The secondary benefit is to get some detail on how the Madness (or is it criminality?) of King Donald manifests. We can tell when Trump is preparing to ask his lawyers to do something unethical or foolish because that’s when he begins scanning the room for note takers. “What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted at an aide who was scribbling in a notebook during a meeting…His paranoia is the best evidence of a guilty conscience.If you wonder why the man who criticized Obama for playing too much golf spends such an incredible amount of time away from the West Wing, one reason (not to minimize Trump’s aversion to actual work) is that his staff schedules him for as much time as possible out of town to reduce the likelihood of major screw-ups. It is not news that the man made famous for the line “You’re Fired,” on TV is too cowardly to fire anyone in person, preferring to do the job by tweet or by having another underling do the deed. What Anonymous calls The Steady State is comprised of like-minded individuals, die-hard Republicans, who favor GOP policies, but are concerned about the behavior of the president. They do what they can to siderail, dissuade, or ignore presidential wishes that fall afoul of the law, common sense, or human decency (in that order). However, even Anonymous admits that the Resistance in the White House has seen its numbers drop and its hopes fade. Not sure if that means Anonymous is now a lone voice or not, but if resistance to foolishness is a lost cause, what is Anonymous still doing there? Anonymous presents clear Republican ignorance, or dishonesty, certainly bias on many occasions. For example, Anon lauds the wisdom of the founders in choosing a representative rather than a direct democracy, as the mob is too subject to flattery and demagoguery, and will overwhelm more sedate reason. While there certainly is some basis for this concern, this manages to put the responsibility for such danger entirely on the people, ignoring that it is business, the business of Fox News and lobbyists, for example, that create these groundswells, and which the Republican Party has been more than happy to exploit to get its way. He lauds Trump for installing a Stronger conservative bench. The installing of right-wing judges on SCOTUS would have happened under any Republican president, and was made possible in part by Mitch McConnell refusing to bring Obama’s nominee to the Senate, essentially stealing a seat. Great guys, those Republicans. He also lauds the burdensome red tape that has been slashed on his watch, closely matched by the resulting degradation of our environment, which is somehow not mentioned. Add to it the changes to our insane tax code. Oh, you mean adding over a trillion dollars to the federal debt by giving money away to the wealthy and to corporations? Now, that’s crazy. And on it goes. Excerpts from A Warning were released in The Washington Post a few weeks before publication. One highlight was of a possible midnight self-massacre to let the public know of the chaos that reigned in the White House. But they didn’t, did they? Which is a lot like watching Jeff Flake or Susan Collins twisting themselves into pretzels before the cameras to avoid admitting they would toe the party line, only to apply all ten toes to that line when it came time to vote. So, aside from dividing Trump’s lackeys into Sycophants (shirts) and Silent Abettors (skins), how much do we actually learn here? Primarily the value of A Warning is in showing us the depth of the morass, just how venal, just how criminally inclined, just how ignorant, just how egotistical, just how intolerant, just how cruel and mean-spirited, just how resistant to knowledge, and just what an absolutely awful human being Trump is. And to portray a White House staff that has to wonder, every bloody day when they wake up, what has he done now? Yeah, and? A Warning does not really tell us much that we did not already know. It is entertaining (in a dark way) at times, but sometimes also feels loaded with filler. It is not a bad book, but in a world lousy with better books about Trump and books about the issues which Trump has impacted like cruise passengers fed bad sushi, I would look elsewhere. You have been warned. We learned that, given enough time and space, Donald J. Trump will abuse any power he is given. Review first posted – January 10, 2020 Publication date – November 19, 2019 . PS - If we still have a republic after Donald Trump walks out of the Oval, or more likely, is carried out in a body bag after a third or fourth secret heart attack, or, my personal favorite, is frog-marched out of the office in the custody of armed law-enforcement or military officers, we will owe him a debt of gratitude. Donald Trump has given the United States an invaluable lesson. By his total disregard for social, legal, and political norms, by his willingness to thumb his nose at the rule of law, he has shown us where our fault lines lie. He has shown us what can happen if we put a malignant narcissist or even a sociopath into the presidency. And we should use this lesson to construct a stronger union, one that does not rely on the good will of decent people to lead our nation, but enshrines into law mechanisms that assure that another Donald Trump can never again happen here. (As of November 2022, we are still waiting) [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Items of Interest -----De Officiis by Marcus Tullius Cicero – on Gutenberg -----Springsteen - Badlands ----NY Times – September, 2018 - I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration ----The Road to Serfdom - by Friedrich Hayek -----The Lincoln Project - Bloodlines ----Other Trumpian books worth a look -----Tyrannical Minds by Dean Haycock -----The Plot to Destroy Democ racy by Malcolm Nance -----Fear by Bob Woodward -----Collusion- by Luke Harding -----Trumpocracy by David Frum -----Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff -----Unbelievable by Katy Tur -----The Case for Impeachment by Allan J. Lichtman -----Truth in Our Times by David E. McCraw ...more |
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Dec 17, 2019
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Dec 29, 2019
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Dec 25, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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0525575472
| 9780525575474
| 0525575472
| 4.35
| 15,082
| Oct 01, 2019
| Oct 01, 2019
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it was amazing
| I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is as clear to me as an electric streetlight piercing the black night. But the political impact of the industry that brings us those things is also worth recognizing as a key ingredient in the global chaos and democratic downturn we’re now living through.Rachel Maddow is the top news personality at MSNBC, host of The Rachel Maddow Show for the last eleven years. One of the smartest people to be found on your television, or screen of choice, she relies on research, facts, and informed guests to present her viewers with as high-end an hour of political news coverage as you can find anywhere, all while being upbeat, friendly, funny, and warm. Watching her show it might not be totally obvious, because she is so nice, but she is a first class hard-edged, incisive intellectual, a Rhodes scholar with a triumph of a book already to her credit, Drift, on our national tendency to war. One other gift Maddow possesses is a talent for story-telling. Watch her A-block (the opening 20 minute segment of her show) some night, any night, for a taste. In Blowout, Maddow looks at the centrality of oil (by which we mean oil and gas) to our history and to the events of the world today. Rachel Maddow didn't set out to write a book. But a nagging question led her there: Why did Russia interfere in America's 2016 presidential election, and why attack the United States in such a cunning way? Although the MSNBC host regularly devotes ample airtime to the topic of Russia on The Rachel Maddow Show, her digging led her to a thesis she thought was too long for TV.[image] Rachel - image from Hooch.net From her depiction of Vladimir Putin’s visit to NYC to celebrate the opening of the first Lukoil gas station in the USA, to the story of alarming means being used in an early attempt at fracking, from a look at how third-world dictators live large on oil revenues, while their people suffer, from the history of oil to the history of Putin, from the big personalities to the local damage, she takes you right there and walks you through the events like a docent leading a group through the Met, a very slippery, oily Met. Watch that glimmery puddle! On our right is a family tree that echoes the shape of a gusher, noting the beginning of oil drilling in 1859, see where Rockefeller and Standard Oil gets into the game, and everything spreads out from there until the canvas is almost entirely covered in iridescent black goo. [image] John D. Rockefeller - image from Curious Historian This one over here is quite surprising. There is a story to the mushrooms. You think fracking for natural gas is a nasty, brute force extraction method, generating vast collateral damage? You would be right of course, but in the 60s and 70s an even scarier method of loosening up the gas trapped in underground shale and sandstone was tested, three times, Nukes! Yes, that’s right. As a part of Project Plowshare, three Hiroshima-level nuclear bombs were detonated in the continental USA. Thankfully, and unsurprisingly, the resulting gas carried a level of radioactivity that was considered unmarketable, so the project was abandoned. Guess it had a very short half-life. Moving on, look over here. We have an excellent painting that shows how the oil/gas companies control academic research as well as government regulatory agencies. Notice how the energy company board overlaps the board of the local university, the one sponsoring the researcher who is looking into the possible causes for the steroidal increase in earthquakes in Oklahoma, an increase that occurred only after the introduction of fracking technology. You might recognize the large claw-like form in the painting, and the academic in that claw being squeezed. Definitely not OK. On your left you will see a more modern image, a dynamic sculpture, showing the recent story of fracking, very angular, as the straight vertical lines veer suddenly horizontal, but are accompanied by vast volumes of a goo called slickwater being forced into the ground. If you look back up to the top, you will see a geyser of very crude crude being forced up out of the ground. The artist has included, as part of the exhibition, a special platform around the work. Go ahead, step up. That bouncing and rumbling you feel beneath you is meant to mimic the actual experience of residents in heavily fracked locations. [image] Putin with his parents in 1985, before being sent to Germany as a KGB officer - image from wikimedia These lovely gilded tryptichs up ahead tell the story of Vladimir Putin, his rise from KGB operative in Germany to possible anti-Christ. Each panel shows a step along his path, growing from unknown KGB agent to mayor of St Petersburg, to the accumulation of a group of loyalists called the siloviki (which would be a great brand name for one of the few products Russia still produces, vodka), to aligning with, then back-stabbing Boris Yeltsin, as the USSR descended from failed social experiment to full on gangster-state kleptocracy. We see in this one to your right how Pootee murders or jails not only political opponents, but anyone foolish enough to own a successful business he wants to steal. Doesn’t the blood red go so dramatically against the gold? Russia's shaky economy, hampered by a reliance on oil and gas, helps explain the country's weakness, and "some of Russia's weakness explains why they attacked us in the way they did," Maddow argues. She says Vladimir Putin exploited Russia's lucrative oil industry to support his vision of making Russia a superpower again. "When you've got one resource that's pulling in such a big revenue stream, you tend to end up with very rich elites who will do anything to hold onto power who stopped doing the other things that governments should otherwise be doing to serve the needs of the people," she said in an interview with All Things Considered. - from NPR[image] Aubrey McClendon - image from Business Insider In the next room we have a few portraits of energy bigwigs, Aubrey McClendon, a genius at picking land to hold for resource development, promoter of shale and gas drilling in the USA and iconic Oklahoma City booster. Liked to use company money for his personal needs and had issues with price-fixing collusion. Got kicked out of his own company. Robert S. Kerr, founder of Kerr McGee, and a remarkably corrupt politician. Harold Hamm, a self-made billionaire who never saw an environmental regulation he did not hate, or a tax he was willing to accept. The big one at the end of the hall, the screaming T-Rex is, of course Rex Tillerson, still spreading carnage across the planet and not yet trapped in that tar-pit with the “DJT” inscription barely visible on it. As you can see in the painting, the artist was aware that T-Rex hunted in packs. No one is safe when these toothy critters were looking for a meal. The bones you see in the background are the remains of scientists who dared to describe the impact carbon-based energy usage has had on the planet, and residents who opposed the local leader siphoning off all the oil royalties for themselves. [image] Harold Hamm - image from AP via Politico Up ahead the mural you see may remind you of Picasso’s Guernica, but this one is called The Resource Curse. It shows how a poor country discovers oil, the pastoral fields being flooded with black, the local leader growing at one end of the mural from a small bully to an inflated grotesque crushing his people alongside an even larger T-rex, the people fleeing and screaming in despair. [image] Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the Equatorial Guinea president, living large on the oil revenues siphoned from the country – image, one of many showing his impressive array of insanely expensive vehicles, from Ghafla! Not all the reporting in the book is horrifying or depressing. Here is one that shows a ring of Russians holding hands, dressed like Americans, living in America. Russian spies, sent here to infiltrate the western enemy, sleeper cells, waiting for the day they would be summoned into action. It was the only part of the book that was laugh-out-loud funny. You’ll see why when you read it. [image] Ten members of the Russian spy program – the inspiration for the TV series The Americans - maybe you recognize a former neighbor here? – image from ABC.Net.AU The next room is kept nicely refrigerated. The ice sculpture in the middle of the room shows an oceanic drilling rig, with dark lines standing in for the inability of the rigs to keep from leaking, and the parts scattered on the icy ocean surface standing in for the advanced safety rig elements that were not used in these early drilling attempts. [image] The Discoverer - grounded in Unalaska, AK, unable to handle Arctic winds – not reassuring – image from Pew Trust As our tour comes to an end, you can leave those parkas in the bin by the door, and be sure to load up with paper towels from the table ahead. It would appear that the billions invested by the energy business in advancing the technology of extraction has in no way been matched by investment in researching clean-up tech. You hold in your hands the state of the art in oil spill clean-up. Pause briefly to smile. Before you read Blowout, you should stock up on your blood pressure medication, maybe schedule some extra time for mindfulness, meditation, or whatever works to keep you from completely losing your mind to absolute rage. Recently a religious friend wondered whether the current president might be the anti-Christ promised in the epistles of John, (and in Islamic lore as well). I suppose Trump would serve as well as any, but on further thought, it seemed to me that, as Trump was very much a puppet of Putin, and thus deserved a demotion, and as Putin was not only running Trump, but has his tentacles around many political and non-political people of importance around the planet, it was Pootee who deserved the title more. On reading Maddow’s book, I am having third thoughts. If Putin is the source of most of the evil in the world (well, certainly a lot of it, anyway) who or what is it that is moving Putin? As you will see in Blowout, much of the mischief Putin has engaged in regarding the USA elections stems from a desire to remove the sanctions imposed after Pootee hacked off the Crimean piece of Ukraine to be absorbed into the Russian Borg. Limitations on the fluidity of the oligarch funds in the West were problematic, particularly as Pootee was the biggest oligarch of them all. But even worse was the limitation placed on western investment in Russia. On its own, and despite its spectacular glut of natural petro/gas resources, Russia is just this side of a failed state, unable to keep up with advances in technology that are now widespread in the West. Russia NEEEEDS the western investment of contemporary extraction technology to retrieve the resources with which it has been blessed, having placed all his national development chips on oil and gas. It is only the nerve of western leaders like Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Joe Biden, with the bi-partisan support of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and other western nations, that saw to it that sanctions were imposed. This kept Pootee from being able to fully exploit Russia’s carbon-based fuel supplies. Not that he or his minions are gonna starve any time soon, but they cannot come close to realizing their ultimate avaricious or nationalistic fantasies without modern means of sucking every last drop out of the ground. And as energy resources have become a primary usable weapon (really, if he let loose the nukes, Russia, and much of the world, would be in cinders in an hour, so not really a practical weapon for immediate needs) in Russian geopolitics, (along with cyber-crime of diverse sorts) he would like to be as well-armed as possible. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that, I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 02, 2019
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Dec 14, 2019
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Nov 02, 2019
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Hardcover
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1643130226
| 9781643130224
| 1643130226
| 3.41
| 169
| Apr 2019
| Apr 02, 2019
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really liked it
| People shy away from parallels to fascism, but it’s important to note that fascism is not a political ideology or strategy but mental pathology of People shy away from parallels to fascism, but it’s important to note that fascism is not a political ideology or strategy but mental pathology of societal scale, starting with an impaired individual manipulating psychological weaknesses in the population to achieve power, and then multiplying the disorder by duplicating it in the general culture.Tyrannical Minds offers a look at a collection of the worst of the worst in despotic leaders, over the last century or so, (sorry Genghis) by peering through a psychological lens at common characteristics. It looks at what may have made these guys the way they were, the traits they manifested, and how we might apply the patterns presented here to contemporary leaders. It is important not only in offering insight into how to deal with foreign despots, but to recognize the patterns in our own people and to try to keep that particular brand of misery from recurring. When Haycock first proposed the book, he was not planning on looking at any US presidents, but wound up having a substantial portion of the work focused on a certain morality-challenged president. [image] Dean A. Haycock - image from his Twitter pages There are plenty of folks today in positions of national leadership for whom the word Tyrant could apply. Madeleine Albright put together an impressive basket of such deplorables in her 2018 book, Fascism, but that used a different scope, offering a pretty narrow definition of fascism and looking to see who, among the considered leaders, might fit. Dean Haycock looks at a range of mostly dead leaders from a psychological perspective. The usual suspects pop up. Little moustache man, Uncle Joe, Chairman you-know-who, Dear Leader, Saddam, and others. What unites these folks? If we can come up with a unifying personality profile, how does DJT’s dainty foot fit into that glass jackboot? Can a psychological analysis of a person predict that person’s behavior under a range of circumstances? Maybe, maybe not. But what if the people doing the analyzing never get to meet their subjects in person? What if they have to rely on records of what the person has said and done? What if the best personal sources for information on the person under consideration have biases of their own that might taint their views? Haycock gives us some background on the psychological profiling of world leaders, including a nifty look at what our intel services cooked up on Adolph way back when. It’s pretty impressive. He looks at the controversies surrounding psychological analysis from a distance, and the role of the American Psychiatric Association in telling its members that it is unethical to offer a “diagnosis” without having conducted a personal examination of the subject. He brings in analysis from a range of professional psychologists and psychiatrists. Haycock points to a condition that is not in the official catalog of defined diagnoses, (the DSM-5, or Diagnostic and Statistical annual of Mental Disorders) Malignant Narcissism, and a broader characterization called the Dark Factor of Personality, or D-Factor. Much of the book is spent checking out the sundry tyrants to see how they measure up in the “D” scale. This includes appealing traits like Machiavellianism, feeling that rules do not apply to them, sadism, belief that they deserve more than anyone else, that they are better than everyone else, callousness, craving admiration and praise, engaging in vendettas against critics…it goes on. Is this ringing any bells? I think we’re gonna need a bigger scale. [image] Young Adolph with Daddy Dearest - image from Warthunder.com Haycock makes a point that plenty of people are narcissistic. It takes a special level of self-involvement to raise that to a diagnosable Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD. And therein lies a significant challenge if one is looking to the narrow point of whether DJT can be diagnosed with a serious mental illness. A counter argument is made that diagnosis is less important than the potential for harm. And mental health pros are duty bound to issue warnings to those who might be affected by the behavior of such subjects. It is clear that there are several factors that must dovetail to generate a top-flight tyrant. First, of course, is DNA. The little SOB needs to have an inherent predilection. But that is far from enough. It helps if the predilection is nurtured by, say, an abusive parent or caregiver. It’s not required, mind you. Mao, for example, was spoiled rotten as a kid. But it definitely helps. You might think of the layout as means (DNA), motive (being pissed off at the world), and last, but not least, opportunity. In this case that means a period of political instability. While it is pretty easy to see that in the case of Hitler’s Germany, suffering from the penalties of losing World War I, and Russia suffering under the Czars and war with Germany. It is less obvious to see a comparable level of societal distress in the USA. Some level, for sure, as wages have stagnated and the economic gains of the last several decades have gone mostly to the already well-to-do. But, while it may be angst and/or rage-inducing, it is not entirely clear that this bit would pass muster in establishing the requisite baseline. There is certainly grounds for concern as more and more jobs are automated or off-shored, and everyone has to worry about whether they will be laid off. And I suppose the increasing ethnic/religious hostility generated by some media sources and happily employed by feckless politicians has been contributing to a growing sense of internal national conflict. Add to the mix that we have some outsiders doing their best to fan the flames of hatred. So, while it may not be a period of turmoil comparable to that experienced by many other nations, or by the USA in other times, there might be enough to push it over the line. In making a point that nurture alone is not sufficient, Haycock offers a comparison of two unnamed boys. Both suffer very similar, miserable upbringings. One becomes a productive member of society, a recording artist. The other becomes Stalin. It is not at all obvious in reading the two stories which was which. A good warning not to jump to conclusions. There is particularly fascinating look at how paranoia serves to keep tyrants in power, while generating a feedback loop that generates more and more paranoia. This includes an insightful look at why it is that working for such people presents an existential threat. [image] Chairman Mao and Stalin (2 photos were merged) – image from BBC Managerial competence allows some despots to thrive (Stalin), while incompetence leads to their demise (Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein) Of course, one might also contend that it was less that they were incompetent than that they made mistakes, which even competent leaders can do. Haycock sees Trump as more like Amin than Stalin. His incompetence emanates, at least, from his bigotry, and manifests in a blatantly racist handling of national immigration policy. The long-term impact of his whites-only immigration preference remains to be seen, but it seems likely that creative intellectual and entrepreneurial migrants will be considering options other than the USA in which to practice their trade, develop new technologies, and build new businesses. This will be a huge loss for the country. Idi Amin made a point of throwing out of Uganda the Asian population that was responsible for a considerable percentage of the national economy. It did not work out well for Amin or Uganda. It seems to me that Trump is less a despot than a wannabe despot. Even when he was merely a candidate, Trump did not really expect to win. He was running as a large-scale business promotion. That is one reason why there was no compunction about pursuing a deal for Trump Tower Moscow during (and certainly after) the campaign. The expectation was that if he lost, no one would care. (The Producers model of politico-econo flim flam) Thus, he did not approach running for president as a quest for power in the same way that other mononymous despots had. Some of them had a form of Messiah Complex, with an associated vision of how things should be remade in their countries. Hitler imagined a Third Reich. Mao wanted to bring medieval China into the modern age. Trump’s primary interest is in stuffing his pockets. He is so extremely narcissistic that he does not care about the country, and would sell (already has sold) it out to feather his own nest. No grand visions here, just avarice. Most of the public policies he pursues are all tactical. He does what he can to keep his base riled and his donors content, and if he can spice that up with a bit of abuse and sadism, well that makes him feel pretty good too. That said, he does manifest some of the behavior that people with a Messiah Complex might, proclaiming that only he can fix things, for instance. But is he the dire, murderous threat that these others clearly were? [image] Saddam Hussein - image from Der Spiegel As a candidate, definitely not. Not much was at stake, really. But as a president, the terms have changed. He has been the subject of many investigations, with many more to come. The only reason he has not already been indicted is that he occupies the highest office in the land. But once he is threatened with ouster, whether by voters or legal proceedings, predicting the future becomes quite a dicey matter. Given his gargantuan narcissism, he cannot tolerate the possibility of rejection (thus the BS about three million mystery voters for Hillary in 2016), and can certainly not tolerate the humiliation of possible arrest, which he would almost certainly face, whether from federal charges possibly recommended by Robert Mueller in the federal realm, or by diverse state authorities. Faced with this, and in the absence of some sort of face-saving exit strategy (leaving office due to ill-health?) there is a very real possibility that he would resort to bloody means to keep himself in office. At that point he might call in someone like Erik Prince to organize whatever private military measures might be necessary to prevent his removal. Sinclair and Fox would be more than happy to go along. And his more cultish followers would insist that he was somehow defending the nation, and not just keeping his corrupt ass out of jail. Hopefully it will not come to that. (This review was first posted in May 2019. The events of January 6, 2020, Desecration Day, provide plenty of evidence that DJT was indeed all in for violence as a way to retain power. It remaims to be seen whether Erik Prince played any role in that.) You know how the Mueller report laid out so many of the awful things that Trump did, but weaseled on bringing actual charges against him? Well, for now. (DOJ guidelines on the prosecutability of the president are internal DOJ rules, not settled law) It’s a lot like that here. Haycock makes it clear that Trump is the poster child for malignant narcissism, with plenty of “D” to keep his tank overflowing, but will not commit to a yes or no on whether the man should be removed from office. It does seem clear, though, that he considers him a potential menace to us all. [image] Idi Amin - image from Face to Face Africa The book is definitely thought-provoking, adding some needed nuance to considerations of mental health in the highest office in the land, and contributes some new concepts to our store of things to be taken into account in looking ahead. I particularly enjoyed the historical elements and appreciated the which-one-will-become-the-tyrant piece. I had some difficulty with what seemed repetition and a bit of murkiness, as we moved from one set of dark traits to another. Had to metaphorically rub my head and concentrate, so is this trait necessary? How about this one? But what if he is missing this one? I understand that things psychological do not always lend themselves to mathematical models, but I can still wish for that, right? Bottom line is that even if the president is running naked in the Oval, hurling his feces all over the walls, thinks Pence is Lurch from the Addams Family, and screams incoherently at anyone who comes into his office, his cabinet and close advisors, and the Republican Party have shown no inclination to do anything about it anyway. Thus, the benefit of this book is less about how we might fix a mental health problem in the Presidency than an offering of grave concern about what a fear-ravaged, and/or barking president might mean for us all. As the institutions of our republic continue to face daily assault by this White House, it is worthwhile to have a sense of just how frightened we ought to be. Review posted – May 10, 2019 Publication dates ----------April 3, 2019 - hardcover ----------April 6, 2021 - trade paperback I received an ARE of Tyrannical Minds from Norton in return for my unquestioning allegiance, and support for their quest for world dominance. I promise I am not plotting anything against them. [image] [image] [image] [image] ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved the EXTRA STUFF segment of the review to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 26, 2019
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May 05, 2019
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May 04, 2019
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Hardcover
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1250184428
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| 4.14
| 572
| Mar 12, 2019
| Mar 12, 2019
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really liked it
| The war over press freedom was not going to be a fight about changing America’s laws. It was going to be a fight about the very nature of truth…I The war over press freedom was not going to be a fight about changing America’s laws. It was going to be a fight about the very nature of truth…I should have seen it coming. In a decade and a half at The Times I had had my moments with Trump and his lawyers. I knew how they played the game.All the News That’s Fit to Print (which should be changed, BTW, to add “or Post” or substitute “Fit to Run”to accommodate the fact that materials these days might be posted without ever being actually printed) does not usually include the doings of its in-house counsel. But in October 2016, at the height of the presidential election campaign, The New York Times had just published an article titled Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately. The accompanying video was quite compelling, the stories from both women believable. It did not take long for a standard response to bad coverage to arrive. Donald Trump Threatens to Sue The Times Over Article on Unwanted Advances. It was typical for Trump to threaten to sue anyone who printed or planned to print anything unflattering about him. But this was at the peak of a presidential campaign, when the damage from bad press could be devastating. In-house counsel David McCraw was charged with preparing a response. He went above and beyond, his reply going viral. In his response he wrote “Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself…if he believes that American citizens had no right to hear what these women had to say and that the law of this country forces us and those who would dare to criticize him to stand silent or be punished, we welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight.” Oh, snap! For the full text, check out The New York Times’s Lawyer Responds to Donald Trump [image] David E. McCraw - Image from Columbia Journalism Review – photo by Santiago Mejia, of The Times That was the most widely known piece of work self-described “raging moderate” David McCraw did while working at The Times, where he has toiled since 2002, and where he is currently Deputy General Counsel. His story has a lot more to it than fighting back against America’s #1 bully, but dealing with issues Trumpian whether directly or by implication makes up the majority of the book. In addition to the kerfuffle noted above, there is a Trump tax return that entered over the transom, leading to an informative discussion of legal culpability re leaks. (The leaker is at risk, not the publisher, as long as the publisher did not do anything to encourage the leaker, but was a passive recipient.) This leads to a look at the very real responsibility publishers take on of checking with the government before printing information that might conceivably endanger lives. Pretty compelling stuff. For much of the past half-century, a balance had been struck. Both sides lived in an imperfect world of discretion…News organizations tried to make informed decisions about what to publish, weighing the risks to the nation and the benefits to the public, and the government held back from tracking down and prosecuting leakers except in the rarest of cases.There are the attempts by the White House to exclude unfriendly news organizations from public briefings, while allowing in journalists of the lap-dog variety. You will learn the difference between a “gaggle” and an official press conference. Of greater concern is the impact Trump is having with his daily attacks on the press, both domestically and internationally. McCraw became very familiar with such concerns as he wound up taking on the job of trying to get back Times people who had been kidnapped by diverse sorts abroad, or had been picked up by local governments. Some of this reads like a thriller. It doesn’t really matter how much freedom the press has in a society if the press is not believed. A distrusted press is little different from a shackled press. It lacks the authority to mobilize public opinion against wrongdoing, corruption and misguided policy. It has no voice to hold governments accountable. It gets ignored. And I was pretty sure that at some point a disregard for the press would translate into a disregard for the law of press freedom.In addition, foreign autocrats are more than happy to chime in about “fake news” and the press being “the enemy of the people” whenever coverage of their questionable doings becomes too energetic, feeling that they not only have cover provided by the journalism-hostile US president, but that attacking the press will gain them points with the White House. This also presents added challenges to protecting American journalists abroad, when the State Department cannot be counted on to help. And then there is the Trumpian fondness for using the courts as a blunt weapon with which to attack any who would criticize him, suing for libel whenever is heard a discouraging word. Other frequent filers are noted, and we learn about the tradition of “lawyer letters” the paper receives in abundance, threats of one sort of lawsuit or another, most of which are, thankfully, ignored. You will learn the proper process for “doing” sex tapes, that is, getting them into the public venue, pick up some info on a law that protects American publishers from being subjected to legal judgments made in nations where press freedom is not valued as highly as it is here, and discover “little guy” lawsuits in which reputations might be devastated simply by appearing in the same news article as someone infamous. You will learn some very unwelcome news on the effectiveness of FOIA legislation. You will learn about the very significant danger involved in going to court to enforce First Amendment press freedoms. You will learn about the dangers inherent in the current downsizing of the newspaper business, and plenty more. The reputation of newspaper lawyers is that they tend toward finding reasons not to publish. McCraw’s rep is more one of making sure the paper can print what it wants, and offering a solid defense when the paper is challenged in court. I did have one particular gripe that merits mentioning. In writing about the issue of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server, it is pretty clear that McCraw presumes the worst, that she was up to no good of one sort or another and sought to hide her activities from public scrutiny. He makes no mention of other government officials having done the same thing, with no vast outcry about their activities, and he makes no mention of the fact that HC had been under non-stop right-wing assault since her days as the wife of the governor of Arkansas. She has been, arguably, the most attacked public figure of our era, and, despite many congressional investigations led by the opposition party, has been found to have done nothing illegal. Any person in such a position could be forgiven for feeling a bit paranoid about her normal communications being intercepted and weaponized for use against her. I would have done the same thing. Yet there was no mention of any mitigating possible circumstances. I expected a degree of balance from someone who works for such a great paper. It’s absence was disappointing. That said, this book is a wonderful source of information and well-defined concerns about the newspaper biz today, and about overarching issues that are already impacting freedom of press in America. McCraw’s journey from his opening view of the Trump administration as just another day at the office to something considerably more alarming is more powerful for the distance McCraw had to travel. I heartily recommend Truth in Our Times. It may not be all the news that’s fit to print about the legal concerns of journalism today, but it will certainly do. I had resisted, in my raging moderate style, all those overheated comparisons to Nazi Germany that too many of my liberal friends offered up much too easily. Now I was no longer sure. Review posted – April 5, 2019 Publication date – March 12, 2019 I received this book from St. Martin's, at least I think it was St Martin's. Just found it outside my door one day, so I am pretty sure the Justice Department cannot come after me for anything in this review. =============================EXTRA STUFF The initial article - Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately Trump’s response - Donald Trump Threatens to Sue The Times Over Article on Unwanted Advances. McCraw’s viral smack-down - The New York Times’s Lawyer Responds to Donald Trump There is a excellent profile of McCraw in the Columbia Journalism Review - Getting the story out: The lawyer standing between the Times and a hostile world - by Andrew McCormick “A distrust of power is the ultimate conservative value,” McCraw says. “It used to be, at least.” In high school, McCraw attended a speech by Peter Arnett, the famed Vietnam war correspondent, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Listening to what the reporters were going through to overcome disinformation coming from the Pentagon and military commanders, I found that really inspiring,” McCraw says. NPR’s Fresh Air - 'Times' Deputy Counsel On Fighting For Press Freedom In The Trump Era - by Terry Gross In the time that he's president, he has really taken a different strategy, or expanded on a strategy he had used outside of lawyer letters before, and that is simply challenging the facts, and doing so publicly. As much as Donald Trump has talked about changing libel laws so it would be easier for people to sue, in fact, I think the greater danger is his attempts at delegitimizing the press, at encouraging people not to believe....more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 20, 2019
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Mar 25, 2019
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Feb 13, 2019
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Hardcover
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0316484814
| 9780316484817
| 0316484814
| 4.23
| 1,365
| Jun 26, 2018
| Jun 26, 2018
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it was amazing
| Hamilton said, “The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country is by flattering the prejud Hamilton said, “The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country is by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion…” Throughout American history, those confusions and commotions have sprung forth in the form of rebellions, clashes, and civil war. Yet America had never been tested with a leader who had the same mindset of King George III; a monarch who ignored the voice of the majority, who ruled as he lived above the rest, and cared not a whit about the traditions of the free society in America.It is a battle scene, two combatants, one, maybe, in brown, one in, let’s say blue. They are engaged in a to-the-death struggle. You are close enough to see the bloodstains on their shirts, the mud on their boots, the sweat pouring down their faces, veins engorged, teeth bared. The soldier in brown steps back, touches a device on his weapon and a pulse of light emerges. With that saber he swings a horizontal arc and dispatches his blue-clad rival. Then pull back. There are other one-on-one, two-on-one, three-on-one, two-on-two battles going on all around them. Soldiers in brown across the scene are halving their rivals. Pull back even farther and you see a sea of struggle. It becomes impossible to tell individual battles as each becomes subsumed in a Boschian scene of mass slaughter. Cast your eyes across the landscape and you might spot on a hilltop a clump of officers astride armored vehicles, spying the battle from afar, no blood on their hands. They wave instructions to nearby adjutants. Then, there, atop a hill at the other end of this landscape another group, a match for the first in all but uniform color. They see that they are overmatched and sound a retreat. But it is too late. The tide has already turned. The modern enemy, the one with the new, and unexpected weapons, has taken the field. News will travel back with the defeated general. The battle is lost, but there may be some hope that the war can still be fought another day. Some of the soldiers had found a way to fend off the death-dealing light, and brought down warriors in blue, but not in enough numbers to prevent a rout. [image] Malcolm Nance - image from his TAPSTRI site Malcolm Nance has drawn our view back from the vision we have of individual battles, even of field battles, to gain a perspective that is, ultimately, global. When you see the contest from afar, you get a better sense of how it is going. In this scenario, most Western democracies are the brown clad warriors, fighting gallantly with weapons that are hopelessly outclassed by the new gear brought to the battle by the blues. There is some hope that they might make a comeback, but until they can do so with their entire forces, instead of just a few clever fighters, they will continue to lose. There are only so many battles you can lose before the war is over. Once we have a view of what the overall battle looks like, we can then zoom back in to see the details of how the battle is being fought, how the enemy is accomplishing its aims, and use that knowledge to construct defenses, and counter-actions that can keep us from losing the war. As long as humans of whatever sort have vied over anything there have been revolutions in weaponry. Some combatant was the first to use a club of wood or bone to attack a rival. Another was the first to fashion a sharp object into an early knife, then spear, then sword. The bow allowed arrows to be launched without the danger of actual contact. The crossbow added power and a degree of mechanization. The longbow added distance. Every era has its new weapons, from chariots to tanks, from rocks to gunpowder, from mustard gas to bioweapons, from nukes to news. And there were certainly those who railed against every new arrival as somehow unfair or not cricket, but the only true measure of weaponry is whether it helps those who wield them accomplish their aims. [image] Early military technologist – image from SyFyWire The United States and most of the nations of Western Europe are at war. This war has been waged without resort to howitzers, tanks, missiles or WMDs. It is a war truly deserving of the name “Infowar.” It is a Global War on Democracy (GWOD), and it is being waged, primarily, by Russia. While other nations, China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, et al, indulge in cyber war of one form or another, the character of their involvement is different. Nance does not go into these. His focus is on Russia. Vladimir Putin’s goal is to Make Russia Great Again. In a PBS interview, Nance described Russia as an economic disaster site, “a trailer park with nukes,” a bit of hyperbole, as he knows that Russia also holds petroleum reserves of 80 billion barrels, and has the world’s largest supply of natural gas, at over 47 trillion cubic meters. It is Putin’s aim to restore Russia to a position of equality with the United States on the world stage, return Russia to the Superpower status the Soviet Union held during the Cold War. As it is clear that his kleptocratic autocracy cannot manage a national economy, the only way to even the playing field is to cut down his enemies. This means NATO, the United States and European powers with the means to stand against him. How does one do that without having to worry about getting vaporized? Enter the advanced ordnance of our age, weaponized information, injected into the lifeblood of modern civilization, the internet. [image] DJT with his handler in Helsinki Nance knows his way around these battlefields of night. He spent two decades in the Navy as a cryptologist and career terrorism intelligence officer, among other assignments, specializing in the Middle East. Since retiring from the military in 2001, he has served as a military contractor in diverse war zones, been a lecturer at an Australian university-based Policing, Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Center, directed an anti-terrorism think tank (link in EXTRA STUFF), appeared on numerous news programs as an intelligence expert, contributed many articles to a wide range of newspapers and magazines, and written several books. Every time you see him on TV, he has something insightful, well-informed, and often prescient to say. In Nance’s view, Vladimir Putin sees himself as a successor to Peter the Great, a charismatic leader determined to elevate his nation among the nations of the world. Like Peter he is looking to expand the Russian Empire, recapturing lands that were once part of the Soviet Union, by warfare if need be. But where Peter led a cultural revolution, bringing Russia into the world of the Enlightenment, Putin has already devolved the crumbling social and political structures of his country to those of a primitive authoritarian gulag. And if Russia is an economic basket case, it does not matter as long as the people in his circle continue to amass to themselves the wealth the nation still produces. Think Koch Brothers in the absence of Democratic Party opposition. What he aims to do is to undermine the West so that its economic advantage is considerably lessened if not removed entirely. [image] Peter the Great So how does a nation go about accomplishing this goal? What is the strategy? What are the tactics? The goal is to weaken his Western rivals. The strategy to do this is to cause internal turmoil, and weaken the ties between those nations. To sow doubt, not just about matters of foreign or domestic policy, but about truth itself. If there is no consensus on the truth there can be no consensus on policy. Part of this plan was to make use of American persons. Based on my knowledge working in this field for years and the secret intelligence manuals of the KGB, Trump was the kind of quality recruit that spies always sought. Every Russian spy knew that it was the greedy, narcissistic, and self-absorbed conservatives that made for the best assets. Almost invariably, they thought they could handle any situation and rarely looked deeper than their financial pockets. Putin was going to push back against any chance that Hillary Clinton would become president. If that meant having to risk going from a cyber war to a hot war, so be it. Maybe it was time to just introduce a little chaos in America. The American Republican Party had been shifting to the far-right for more than two decades. Many of them supported a strong man and powerful national leader like Vladimir Putin. Putin’s own contacts with the religious right presented him with the opportunity to co-opt an entire party. It was far too tempting to avoid. If it could be done in the United States, it could be done everywhere else in the world—save China. A successful co-option of the American right would lead to an entire “wing of supporters operating the most powerful nation on earth and viewing Putin as its closest ally. Russian intelligence would go back and scrub every document and contact about Donald Trump from his overtures made in the late 1980s. If they could pull it off, why not try?Nance offers a list of the sorts of assets there are, Unwitting Assets, Witting Assets, Useful Idiots and Fellow Travelers, and tells how assets are developed, and can serve the cause, even though they may sometimes be totally unaware that they are being used. Trump began as a Useful Idiot, later becoming an Unwitting Asset, and then developed into a Witting Asset, on seeing an alignment of his interests with Putin’s. And if you think that the too-frequent off-book meetings between Trump and Putin are anything but Trump reporting in to his handler, then really, you either need to stop taking drugs, or need to start taking more. Nance tells of CIA director John Brennan learning early on about Russian hacking and attempts to influence Trump. He asked foreign intelligence services to look into this and got confirmation that Putin was all in to elect Swamp Thing. [image] John Brennan - image from RollingStone – This is about as cheery as Brennan ever looks, and for good reason Putin’s attacks on the West are implemented through Hybrid Warfare, an amalgam of cyber, special operations, and intelligence activities. They were to carry out political warfare missions just short of open war and push back NATO’s influence. Georgia was the first unit on the test bed… Russia was eager to push back against the color revolutions that were paring away the buffer states that insulated it from European invasion. Of course, more kinetic elements were involved as well, as parts of Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) were hacked off by Russia, after it had spent years promoting ethnic turmoil. Russia also was able to turn off internet access while they were about seizing real estate. The Hybrid Warfare model was applied in diverse European nations, manifesting in support of fascist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in France, and Brexit in the UK. Thankfully the French have a media blackout period in the days leading up to elections, which dampened the impact of Russian social media interference. Their efforts were more successful in the UK where Russian intelligence agencies flooded the UK’s on-line media with vast quantities of false news. And using the expertise developed by Cambridge Analytica—a company funded in part by the far-right Mercer family and their super-PACS, and which includes on its board of advisors both Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner—to efficiently micro-target individual voters to receive their dishonest media products. Russia has been ahead of the rest of the world in developing internet intelligence capacity, and weaponizing that to cause the most mayhem in the West. It may not be bullets, but it most definitely is warfare. [image] Whether you think of them as trolls or agents, Russia’s info-warriors are many, smart, and very effective Europe has not exactly ever been short on xenophobic political parties. But now those creatures had a sponsor, a nation (Russia) and a leader (Putin) who offered material support and provided as well an image of white, Christian, ultra-conservative leadership. These European xenophobic parties have the universal characteristic of openly aligning themselves with Moscow and accepting their overt and covert political patronage including being openly funded by Moscow. As a sign of their gratitude, Moscow has become the de facto capitol of the anti-Atlantic, anti-globalization, white conservative world. These groups all have the same ideological worldview. They see themselves as the opponents to the NATO-European world order. They want to realign the world with Moscow as the Christian cultural protector who helps them smash the establishments that kept stability since WWII.Nance identifies these players in an alarming number of European states. The goal is Russian dominance, the strategy is to undermine democracy, forge alliances with authoritarian regimes, break up NATO and Western alliances, where possible, and prevent the USA from acting to prevent it from realizing its expansionary dreams. To get what it wants, it is necessary not just to turn a few potential traitors into assets, not just to further corrupt the already corrupt, but to undermine democracy itself in the West. Nance shows us how it is being done, just like so many of Trump’s lies, right out there in public, all the better to hide the other crimes that are taking place in the darkness. Populist dictators and strongmen use divisive techniques and attacks to foster splits in their societies and to break the hold of establishment norms in order to rise to national leadership through a negative form of “people power”—to assert that the system “is rigged against you,” where in many cases, the system is built and working properly for these very same people. The populist authoritarian is the master of the rant, a demagogue of the highest order, and runs an agenda which generally brings about ruin.Just as an intelligence officer would do, Malcolm Nance, in The Plot to Destroy democracy lays out the facts, offering evidence where available, and analysis where called for. Just as the president does when presented with such information, you choose. You decide. Do you believe the guy who has been studying this all his life, or dismiss it as fake intel? Unless you are in the thrall of someone who is holding the lure of a fabulously lucrative real estate deal as encouragement; unless you are terrified that that same person might release to the world recordings of your many crimes; unless you are concerned that your election might be formally tainted by proof of foreign interference; unless you have a good reason to deny the facts, it seems pretty clear which way your decision will go. The sirens are sounding, the alarms are going off. The enemy is inside the gates. It is time to identify and remove those who would do us harm, time to devise better barriers to infiltration, and reinforce what means we have at our disposable to fight back, to push back, to save our democracy. Published – June 26, 2018 Review first posted – February 15, 2018 [image] [image] [image] [image] ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 26, 2019
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Feb 08, 2019
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Jan 26, 2019
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Hardcover
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1501175513
| 9781501175510
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| Sep 11, 2018
| Sep 11, 2018
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really liked it
| …the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - Franklin Delano Roosevelt Inaugural address – March 4, 1933 Real power is—I don’t even want to use the …the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - Franklin Delano Roosevelt Inaugural address – March 4, 1933 Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear. - Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in an interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa on March 31, 2016FDR was correct. The fear that gripped the nation in the Great Depression may have had a basis in reality, but acceding to that fear could have hindered any attempts to make the dire economic situation better. Would Roosevelt feel the same way today? Do we have nothing to fear but fear itself? Well, we do have a very concrete problem that generates a fair bit of concern, anxiety, nervousness, and yes, fear. The guy in the White House. The fear that Roosevelt addressed was a concern that the nation, under the weight of the latest in a series of economic collapses, might not be able to recover from it soon enough to matter, leaving the nation impoverished, riven with internal strife, and in danger from external enemies. The fears we contend with today include a widespread concern about a declining standard of living, a whipped-up concern about minorities, both foreign and domestic, distrust of those who worship differently, or not at all, confusion about increasing gender fluidity, and diversity. But there are specific fears that center on the guy in the Oval Office, both of the incoming and outgoing sorts. [image] Bob Woodward - image from the Washington Post As illustrated in the opening quote above, (which is the opening of the book as well, the Trump quote, that is) Donald Trump believes the application of fear in dealing with people and nations is the proper course. Threats, bullying, and intimidation are the favorite irons in his bag. In the application of this approach, it is distinctly possible that he might miscalculate to the point of sparking economic mayhem, or even war. But the other element of fear that should terrify us all is his fear for himself. Donald Trump has paid vast sums of money to see that his under-the-covers philanderings remain under cover. (“You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” he said. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.”) He is terrified that the world might see what an empty vessel he truly is. You may recall his conversation with the Mexican president in which Trump pleaded with El Presidente to give him some political cover so he would not have to face his supporters with the news that building the wall was really only a campaign scam. He is afraid that he will be shown to be a mobbed-up front-man, a tool for the Russian mafia, living large by laundering their ill-gotten rubles. He is terrified that he will be exposed as an asset of the Russian government, impacting American foreign and domestic policy in ways that advantage his Russian handler. Where those fears become kinetic is in how he attempts to protect himself. He has done his best to shred the two American institutions that might hold him accountable, the justice system and the fourth estate, waging war on truth itself. Trump has been griping about the media, well the media that is not Fox, Infowars, Clear Channel, Rush Limbaugh, or any of the far right-wing outlets that serve as a public relations propaganda support system for him, at least since his campaign. It has always seemed clear that the intent here is to erode the standing of news organizations that were likely to expose his many misdeeds. His attacks on judges handling suits against him, on the FBI, which was investigating his campaign’s potential ties to Russia, and on the Justice Department, which controls the FBI, and under which the Special Counsel was appointed, are all attempts to undermine the authority of agencies that are likely to bring his crimes to light and him to justice. If he can persuade the American people that the cops and judges are all corrupt he might get away with his particular responsibility for decades of money-laundering, at the very least, and quite likely a traitorous alliance with Putin, whether entered into willingly or via blackmail. Fending off investigators, public and journalistic, is an existential challenge for him, driven by his fear of exposure. The focus of Woodward’s book is on one particular form of fear, the concern the people who work for Donald Trump have that he might do serious damage to the United States, and even to the world, either in his handling of potentially fraught negotiations, domestic or international, (there is particular attention paid to dealings with South and North Korea that illustrates this very well) or in his need to preserve his freedom, and privilege, by destroying respected norms and institutions. He is Godzilla, and we are all Tokyo. [image] Another substantial element is the chaos that is the White House, where established lines of communication and authority are regularly crossed, where the staff are constantly on the edge, wondering when the next absurd and/or dangerous presidential action may require their intervention, to try talking him out of it, slow him down, or make the requisite paperwork vanish. A third theme that permeates is Trump’s flaws as a leader, his lack of intellectual curiosity, his adherence to preconceived notions regardless of research and advice that would lead a flexible human to a more informed opinion, (for example, accusing Iran of violating the treaty despite his own people telling him that they had not) his inability or unwillingness to take in more than a minimum amount of information on pretty much any subject, suggesting an attention deficit disorder. You have probably heard quite a few quotes from this book, as coverage of its contents has been widespread. Perhaps the most significant are in the prologue It was no less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the president of the United States and his constitutional authority. In addition to coordinating policy decisions and schedules and running the paperwork for the president, Porter told an associate, “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.” …the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.As with Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Steve Bannon has clearly offered the author considerable information on the goings on inside the White House. It is also clear that there are many other insiders who have talked to Woodward. One must always wonder, of course, where reporting events accurately leaves off for these sources, and where reputation embellishment begins. Thankfully, Woodward has gone to great lengths to corroborate diverse accounts to arrive at an accurate picture. I would be inclined to take what is reported in this book as the best obtainable version of the truth. Here are some other details that are worth remembering. -----Reince Preibus, as head of the GOP, had invested heavily in analytics and big data, over $175 million, and was very effective in using the drill-down intel to target neighborhoods with battalions of volunteers in the 2016 election. The intel even allowed targeting of individuals. -----It was in 2015 that the NSA first found that Russia was looking at US voter rolls. -----After pussygate, while almost all of his advisors urged Trump to drop out of the presidential race, there were two who urged him to stay in, Bannon, which is no shock, and Melania, which is, given the general view that she wanted no part of a presidential run. -----Woodward also reports that, while Trump and Melania operate in pretty much separate spheres, there is genuine affection between the two. Color me skeptical. ----- It was interesting to learn how much influence and access Lindsay Graham had at the White House, which goes a long way to explaining how Graham could have pulled such a 180 on Trump. Graham had called Trump a “race-bating xenophobic bigot” in 2015, but in 2018, Graham said “He’s not, in my view, a racist by any stretch of the imagination.” It’s enough to give a guy whiplash. -----Fascinating to read about Trump’s lawyer John Dowd and his dealings with Trump and Robert Mueller. -----It was somewhat alarming learning of the sundry notions that were floated by presidential advisors re how to deal with North Korea’s acquisition of ICBM capability. -----And also alarming, although not at all surprising, to read of John Kelly’s avid hostility toward Dreamers. ----- His people manage Trump’s time so he gets home after the weekend news on CNN and MSNBC goes into softer mode at 9pm. Much of the book goes into specifics on the hirings and firings that keep the doors of the White House in need of constant oiling. Sometimes the idiocy is mind-boggling. Trump, early on, passed over John Bolton for a significant position because he did not like his moustache. Not that I have any particular fondness for Bolton, myself, but you do not base such decisions on the quality of someone’s facial hair. I mean he hired Ty Cobb, for god’s sake, or had him kidnapped from another century. Gripes – Woodward sticks by his public position that the Steele dossier was a “garbage document” and that Comey should not have presented any of it to the president. It is unclear on what Woodward bases this position, given the solidity of the investigator, and the ongoing verification of information reported in that document. You have probably heard/read this, but here are some of the lovely things said about Trump by his own appointees -----Cohn had witnessed this for over a year—denial when needed or useful or more convenient. He’s a “professional liar,” Cohn told an associate. -----He’s a fucking moron,” Tillerson said so everyone heard. ----- Trump had failed the President Lincoln test. He had not put a team of political rivals or competitors at the table, Priebus concluded. “He puts natural predators at the table,” Priebus said later. “Not just rivals—predators. -----The president’s unhinged,” Kelly said -----Trump normally wouldn’t listen long or very carefully to his national security adviser but it had gotten much worse, McMaster told Porter. “It’s like I can’t even get his attention.” -----Cohn realized that Trump had gone bankrupt six times and seemed not to mind. Bankruptcy was just another business strategy. Walk away, threaten to blow up the deal. Real power is fear… Applying this mind-set from his real estate days to governing and deciding to risk bankrupting the United States would be a different matter entirely. ----- In a small group meeting in his office one day, Kelly said of the president, “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown. “I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had. -----McMaster said that he believed Mattis and Tillerson had concluded that the president and the White House were crazy. As a result, they sought to implement and even formulate policy on their own without interference or involvement from McMaster, let alone the president. ----- In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.” The man really commands loyalty in his people. And then there are the insults, the abuse to which he subjected that staff, regardless of their level of loyalty to him. It is amazing anyone will even speak to the man. I will spare you those. It is obvious that there is a clear and present danger to all Americans from the man currently resident in the White House, a man who is not only unfit to hold this highest position in the nation, but a man whose dull intellect, exuberant venality, core-deep corruption, contempt for American values and laws, authoritarian inclinations, and unsurpassed greed have made him the worst president in the history of the nation. His rigidity and ignorance have caused even people who share the political values he espouses to engage in activities that are probably criminal in order to spare the nation the downsides of his ill-informed, and often darkly-intentioned decisions. Fear is not the only thing we have to fear. We have just cause to fear what Donald Trump might do with the gigantic instrument he has been charged with operating. While busying himself looting the national treasure for himself and his pals, while paring back sane restrictions on polluting industries, while dismantling much of the mechanism of government that produces and distributes factual information for the nation, while engaging in border practices that make us remember the 1930s and 1940s, he is also busy tearing down respected institutions, shredding political and moral norms, and making the USA the laughingstock of the world. So, President Roosevelt, it is most certainly NOT THE CASE that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. There are plenty of fear-generating people, nations and events on our planet that can justify our fears. But the one that supersedes all, for the moment, is Donald J. Trump. He is a danger to us all, and, as the investigations into his dark deeds progresses, he is only getting more paranoid and desperate. Be afraid. Be very afraid. We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests. Review first posted – 9/21/18 Publication date – 9/11/18 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages September 5, 2018 - I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration - by Anonymous Interviews -----September 15, 2018 - New York Magazine - Bob Woodward on the ‘Best Obtainable Version of the Truth’ About Trump - by Olivia Nuzzi -----September 5, 2018 – CNN - 13 totally bananas moments from Donald Trump's phone call with Bob Woodward - by Chris Cillizza. – a fun piece ----- September 14, 2018 - The Guardian - Bob Woodward: 'Too many people are emotionally unhinged about Trump' - by David Smith ----- September 14, 2018 - KQED.org – Washington Week Washington Week episode: ‘Fear’ inside the Trump White House - with Robert Costa – Woodward’s final line in the interview - “He’s really disabled. He can’t tell the truth.” Items of Interest -----October 15, 2018 - A nice short video that puts the current danger into historical context - If You’re Not Scared About Fascism in the U.S., You Should Be -----February 22, 2019 - Atlantic Magazine - The Alarming Scope of the President's Emergency Powers - by Elizabeth Goitein - When push comes to prosecute or impeach, do you really expect Trump to accede to the rule of law? This alarming article points out the many tools available to Swamp Thing that might be misused to keep his crooked ass out of jail. Be afraid. Be very afraid. -----March 7, 2019 - NY Times - Nicholas Kristof offers an optimistic perspective on the unlikelihood of a Trump Reich - We Will Survive. Probably. -----March 14, 2019 - NY Times - Donald Trump’s Bikers Want to Kick Protester Ass - building a brownshirt militia - this is really bad -----But Lawrence O'Brien Lawrence O'Brien thinks it's just gas. Sure hope he's right. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 12, 2018
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Sep 18, 2018
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Hardcover
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0316515736
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| 0316515736
| 3.68
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| Oct 02, 2018
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it was ok
| Jess was hardly alone in continuing to believe the canard that Obama was a Muslim.The 2016 presidential election was certainly a shock to our nati Jess was hardly alone in continuing to believe the canard that Obama was a Muslim.The 2016 presidential election was certainly a shock to our national social, political, racial, and religious systems. Ben Bradlee Jr. is probably best known to us as the Boston Globe editor heading an investigation into the local Catholic Church’s efforts to hide its decades-long history of child abuse, that effort having been made into the Oscar-winning film Spotlight. He was interested in trying to understand how this blue-to-red change was effected. He focused on places that had voted Democratic in the past, but which had gone for Trump this time. The location he settled on as epitomizing that reversal was Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, a place that has been considered for many years a bellwether for voting outcomes. As goes Luzerne, so goes Pennsylvania. As goes Pennsylvania, so goes the nation. Not that this is causative, certainly, but if one can examine what happened to turn people around in a place like Luzerne, you would expect that to apply to many more such places across the country. [image] Ben Bradlee Jr. - image from TheEditorial Let’s say it up front. I have serious issues with this book. I have been a resident of Luzerne County, the city of Wilkes Barre specifically, the county seat, since June 2017. While this hardly makes me an expert on the area, I have had a lot more time here than Bradlee, who dropped in for week-long visits about five times over the course of his research. I have also had considerable contact with members, workers in, and officials of the local Democratic party here, getting to know many of the local players, not least because my wife and I have been working on the mid-term elections as volunteers with the party since June. So yes, I begin with a position of hostility to Trump and to those who endangered our nation by helping put him into the oval office. But it does not mean that my brain has stopped functioning, or that I have somehow lost the ability to look at a book and identify strengths and flaws. Just laying my cards on the table. Bradlee opted, for his primary approach, on selecting Luzerne Trump voters and Republican public figures and seeing what makes them tick. There is one chapter (out of ten) in which he talks with Democrats. Frankly that was the most informative part of the book. He finishes up with one chapter of analysis. The Forgotten is in large measure a book-length piece of stenography in which Bradlee repeats what his subjects say, while offering zero pushback to the many falsehoods they claim as truths, (I can imagine him telling his interviewees, “I’m here to listen, not criticize.”) and a minimal number (I counted three, although it is possible there were more) of aside-to-the-reader corrections of such misconceptions. If you’re gonna do it in some chapters why not in the others? I can watch Fox news, listen to Rush, or read Drudge or Breitbart to get this. Bradlee could have saved himself the time and energy. Most of what these folks believe, that informs their political decisions, is false. They are largely dittohead receptors of propaganda, carefully prepared by the right-wing purveyors of such materials. Few of Bradlee’s Trump-supporter subjects indicated any intellectual curiosity, certainly not enough to do any digging of their own into policy matters. They are committed to their views, by and large, and are in no danger of being swayed by facts or alternative perspectives. In his primary interviews several elements are mostly common. These constitute boilerplate for most in that camp. You probably already know these, but you might find one or two new items on the list. And It is certainly possible I omitted one or two: -----No Collusion. The Mueller probe is a witchhunt. -----Minorities are getting to live large on the dole (epitomized here by a thing called the “Access Card” which is used by public assistance recipients for purchases.) while regular folks see their taxes increased -----Obama is a Muslim, who hates America -----Obama Care represents government takeover of all medical care -----Hatred of Hillary is visceral, with regular mention of Benghazi and the Clinton Foundation as items of scorn – they want a special counsel to investigate her -----Homosexuality, same-sex marriage in particular, is considered an abomination. Extending marital rights to gays is seen as somehow diminishing them -----Trump was selected for the presidency by God – was Obama also selected by God? I doubt it. I first ran into this in an on-the-street discussion (a polite term) with the pastor of a church near my home. He insisted that God had selected DJT as president. I suggested that Putin had a lot more to do with installing Trump into office than Jesus. This preacher, BTW, was offering his congregants tickets to a recent Trump rally at the local arena. -----There should not be state-church separation -----Blame the media for attacking Trump -----Even his supporters are not thrilled about Trump’s incessant tweeting Familiar, right? The Divine Right thing would have been news to me had I not had a personal encounter with a proponent. But this is mostly boilerplate Republican base world-view. Not the view of the people at the top, not the funders, the Kochs, Melon-Scaifes, the Devosses, and the other dark money billionaires who are the real powers in the GOP. They know better, but use their media outlets to misinform, enrage, and otherwise manipulate the base. At its core, I found this to be a flawed approach. It would be like trying to understand the Civil War by talking almost exclusively to Confederates. (And speaking of which, in the city of Hazleton, which recently became a majority minority city, one local citizen has taken to driving through town in his black pickup. His truck has an American flag on one side, in the back, and a Confederate flag on the other side.). Merely repeating what his subjects had to say, in the absence of almost any sort of fact-checking, seems like lazy journalism to me. Even if Bradlee had decided to listen, record, and repeat, he could still have pointed out either at the end of each chapter or interspersed among the interviewee’s comments, where what they said was at variance with reality. That he mentioned only a few such corrections is inconsistent and very frustrating. I have kept the quotes in this review to a minimum. I had begun reading the book in hardcover, but was asked to check out a relatively new GR feature, Kindle Notes and Highlights, so read most of it there. As part of that, I highlighted a lot of passages, adding my less than enthusiastic comments for each. For a fuller Monty of my reaction to the book, I strongly suggest you check out my KNH postings. But there was one quote that stood out. It is from forty year old Alia Habib, who grew up in Wilkes Barre, and found a whole new world when she went away to college. Off at Barnard, Habib felt liberated. “I was surprised that people think I’m pretty! It was shocking to me. Or that people like that I’m smart. I never looked back.” She thinks many whites in Luzerne County view issues such as drugs, welfare, and crime through a racial prism. “There is this sense among a lot of people that blacks and Latinos are getting more benefits than they are—to the town and county’s detriment. This is a very widely held view. A sense that ‘they are taking from people like us’—taking jobs and safety in the community—and that’s consciously or unconsciously part of what Trump spoke to. And Wilkes-Barre has a crime problem that is understood in racial terms. Newcomers are seen as drug dealers or benefit scammers. I think this informed people’s vote, and there was no sense that the Democrats helped them—just people of color.I have posted in EXTRA STUFF a link to an article she wrote for Buzzfeed about her experience growing up in Wilkes Barre and how contemporary considerations of rust-belt places never look beyond its white residents to the impact of economic decline on its minorities as well. Her take on the views of folks here is spot on, from what I have seen and heard. Crime is because of the drugs that are being brought into town by blacks and Hispanics in their view. Who is buying those drugs never makes it into the conversation. There is widespread belief that anyone with an Access card is undeserving and somehow living large. And reports abound of new arrivals having been directed by social service workers in other states to come to Pennsylvania for its supposedly more generous public assistance. I suspect this is an urban myth, but cannot prove a negative. It is the case that there is probably no glut of decently paying jobs in the area, but there are several universities in the area and a large number of hospitals and related services. There is certainly a large number of available positions in service jobs, like restaurants and retail stores. There has been an influx of large warehouse operations in the area, and they are always looking for help, judging by the number of help-wanted signs all around Wilkes Barre and nearby communities. One impediment for many local people is the feeling that taking a relatively poorly paying job is beneath them. They had worked at some point in their lives at good-paying middle-class jobs, and would rather not take something that represents a step down. FWIW, I hasten to note that my take on the employment situation is anecdotal, based on observation, not analysis and the last bit, in particular, is speculative. I do not have hard research to back this up. Bradlee looks to tie things up in the Epilogue, finally offering some looks at the beliefs of his subjects. Even in doing this, his effort is weak-kneed and sometimes just sad. He actually writes, Despite delivering for his supporters in the culture wars, Trump’s policies as president have not always been in his supporters’ economic interests.You’re kidding, right? Try not ever in his supporters’ economic interests. And then how about Trump’s base continues to love him anyway, mostly because, on his Twitter feed and at his ongoing campaign rallies, he has fed them a steady diet of entertaining, rhetorical red meat. They love his feistiness, how he never apologizes, how he stands up for their values, and how he sticks it to his enemies every day.Really? Like the value of hard work? honesty? decency? His supporters may follow him mindlessly, but the book would be more honest if there were some indication that this is what they feel and that this feeling is not something with any basis in reality. The primary values he expressed for his followers were a hatred of the other and a feeling of victimization. In those cases, mission accomplished. He also toes what seems a pretty common media line about what Democrats should do to get themselves back in power. To win back Trump voters in Luzerne County and many places like it around the country, Democrats will need to more clearly define what they are for, rather than who and what they are against: Trump the man and everything he stands for. And the party, whose base has shifted away from the working class to the middle, upper-middle, professional, and creative classes, will need to make more room for centrist voices if it wants to reach voters who now feel culturally alienated from its prevailing liberal orthodoxy. In addition, the Democratic Party, which has long prided itself on its tolerance, will have to curb the tendency of many of its leaders to use a broad brush to paint most Trump voters as bigots.The bubble speaks. Dems are doing a pretty good job of presenting what they stand for. It is the click-addicted media that insists on covering every Trump statement, about every trivial matter, while giving practically no coverage to the actual policy proposals and plans offered by Democratic candidates. In case you missed the headlines in your local paper and almost all electronic media, Dems are standing for protecting Obama Care, protecting the insurability of people (all of us really) with pre-existing conditions. Dems stand for fair tax policies, not rip-offs by the exceedingly wealthy. Dems stand for equal rights for all Americans, regardless of race, gender, religion and sexual identity. Dems stand for comprehensive immigration reform, not scapegoating foreigners to gain political points with the GOP base. Dems stand for protecting the environment, not selling off public treasures to private interests, not abandoning laws and rules that protect all Americans from pollution in our air, water, and soil. Doesn’t make for snappy bumper stickers. But it makes a lot more sense for bringing the nation together. Click-baiting is part of the problem that Trump exploits to divide us from each other. There are places, for sure, where Democrats of a more liberal stripe have no chance of being elected. An appropriate response is to run candidates who can still support most Democratic policy positions. Some is better than none, purism notwithstanding. But that does not mean that the Democratic party needs to continue the drift right that Mr Bradlee seems to favor. If anything, the party needs to continue supporting those crazy liberal programs that the vast majority of Americans have come to rely on and support overwhelmingly, programs that were opposed by Republicans and decried as being horrific examples of the evils of Socialism, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. If this be leftism, make the most of it. And as for most Trump voters being bigots, I would certainly be very interested in seeing actual, professional research into this. I expect that a significant portion of those who voted for Trump in 2016 really were just looking to shake things up, however misguided that approach may have turned out to be. But, frankly, it seems to me, until research demonstrates otherwise, that a pretty sizeable portion of Trump voters are indeed bigots of one stripe or another. We got to see them in full regalia in Charlottesville. One of the people interviewed for this book is a neo-Nazi who now holds a local public office. Several of the people Bradlee interviewed felt it necessary to insist at interview’s end that, despite the views they had espoused to him, they were not racists. Well, ok, if you say so. There are a few interesting tidbits to be found in Bradlee’s interviews with Trumpkins. One even entailed a possible marital breakup, as one party was a full-on Trump believer, and the other considered Trump a fake Republican. One veteran was unhappy with Trump dismissing trans-gender military personnel. Only one of this red squad showed any hesitation about voting orange again in 2020. If one is trying to look at why Trump won in 2016 in Luzerne County there are many factors to consider, factors that Bradlee has given no attention. It would be meaningful to look at voting metrics for the area in light of metrics across the nation, and in similar counties. Who voted? Who didn’t? And why? Was there any issue with voter suppression? What was the impact of the Bernie Sanders campaign on Hillary? Was third party voting higher this time than in the past? If one is looking at crime and the opiod crisis as problems, it makes sense to offer context. If certain crimes have become more frequent, does that reflect local changes or national trends? I don’t know the answer to that, but the book does not help. One factor that I have been learning about recently is that the local Democratic electoral ground game in 2016 was sorely lacking, a failure not only of the Clinton campaign, but of the county Democratic organization. Materials that are typically available during campaigns, lawn signs, bumper stickers, buttons, other campaign paraphernalia, were in short supply, and even when available, were sometimes left unused for inexplicable reasons. Hillary’s campaign did not even open up an office in Wilkes Barre until way late in the campaign. Clearly the quality of one’s opposing machine should figure in how a battle turned out. And then there are simple factual errors that were surprising. Bradlee writes that both NYC and Philadelphia are about two hours away. Sorry, Charlie, Philly, maybe, but NYC, by which I mean Manhattan, is more like three and a half, presuming no rain, snow, sleet, construction, accidents, whiteouts from fog (yes, I have had the pleasure), or other impediments to movement. In referring to State Representative Eddie Day Pashinski (a great guy I am working to re-elect) Bradlee writes that Pashinski had been in office for 25 years. Nope. He was first elected in 2006. I would love to see Eddie serve 25 years, but that may take a while yet. Sometimes Bradlee omits relevant information. One of the people he talks with, although not one of his prime interviewees, is Sue Henry. He mentions her as a leading talk-show personality in the area, but neglects to note that she is a right-wing talk-show host, that her show was a lead-in to Rush Limbaugh’s and that she is currently running as the Republican candidate for the Pennsylvania State Assembly in the 121st district. Though a mix of urban and rural, Luzerne is covered by parts of the Appalachian mountain range and is on the whole more rural in character. While there are pockets of well-heeled suburbia, Luzerne is less Northeast Corridor than Appalachia.Did Bradlee really spend weeks in Luzerne? Really? Geographically, there may be some merit to that characterization, but there is none at all in terms of the overall population, which is concentrated in small cities and suburbs. Many of the numerous cities, townships, and boroughs in Luzerne are separated more by street signage than geography, and would be considered neighborhoods in a larger entity, were it possible to join them together politically. According to Wikipedia, the Metropolitan Statistical Area that includes Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton had a population of over 555,000 as of 2017. (Scranton being in Lackawanna County) These are rust-belt cities, however struggling, and quite far from the image of rural decline the author suggests. You could probably apply the same test to New York State, and arrive at a similar rustic conclusion. I won’t say that The Forgotten is a waste of ink, paper, and time. For folks who are not much exposed to people who think like Trump supporters, it might offer a revelation as to just how impossible it might be to change their minds about anything. But really, you should know that already. Between the factual errors, odd omissions, fantasy-based beliefs that are left untouched, and general approach, The Forgotten does a poor job of casting light on what, in Luzerne County, led up to the switch from blue to red. It will certainly be interesting to see how the mid-terms turn out here. But, aside from the concise quote from Ms. Habib, there is not much in The Forgotten that is worth remembering. Review posted – November 2, 2018 Publication date – October 2, 2018 EXTRA STUFF has been moved to the comment #1 due to space considerations ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 26, 2018
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0062661396
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it was amazing
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All right, USA, who wants to go first? Come on, come on someone, anyone. Let’s see some hands. No? No one? All right then, Mother Nature will just hav
All right, USA, who wants to go first? Come on, come on someone, anyone. Let’s see some hands. No? No one? All right then, Mother Nature will just have to choose one of you. Eenie meenie, miney mo, which will be the first to go? All right, Tangier Island, looks like you’re it. Congratulations! You are the premier official global warming refugee site in America. Come on down and receive your prize. Free ferry tickets to the mainland. Don’t let the waves hit you on your way out. [image] Tangier Island - photo credit – Andrew Moore for the NY Times It is a community unlike any in America. Here live people so isolated for so long that they have their own style of speech, a singsong brogue of old words and phrases, twisted vowels, odd rhythms. Its virtually amphibious men follow a calendar set by the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and they catch more of the prized delicacy than anyone else. It is a near-theocracy of old-school Christians who brook no trade in alcohol, and kept a major movie from filming in their midst over scenes of sex and beer. And not least, this is one big, extended family: All but a few islanders can trace their lineage to a single man.[image] David Schulte, from the Army Corps of Engineers, on the beach in what’s left of the Tangier region called Uppards – image from the NY Times – photo by Andrew Moore Earl Swift was a reporter for the Virginia Pilot when he got his first briny taste of Tangier island in 1999. He wrote several pieces about this little-known place, that was not only isolated (as isolated as one can be only twelve miles from the mainland), but facing considerable long-term challenges. Tangier had been used by Native Americans for hunting and fishing. It was first mapped in 1608 by one John Smith (you may have heard of him) and not regularly occupied, by Westerners anyway, until 1686, when the Royal Marines built Fort Albion there. It is expected to be claimed by the bay by the mid/late 21st century. It will be rendered uninhabitable long before that. Sparked by a significant item from Scientific Reports in 2015, Swift’s interest was rekindled and he opted to take a closer, deeper look. …little Tangier is important in one respect. As the Scientific Reports article concluded, it’s likely to be the first to go. That experience—and the uncomfortable questions it forces the country to confront—will inform what the rest of us on and near coasts can expect in the decades to come. What makes a community worth saving? Will its size alone prompt the nation to fight for its survival—or are other, less tangible factors as important? Which such factors count the most? And if size is the chief consideration, what’s the cutoff, the minimum population, that’s worth rescue? What, in short, is important to us?[image] Earl Swift - image from the University of Missouri - Saint Louis For some the potential demise of Tangier is a crying shame, the loss of a culture that has grown its own ways and language, a real community of real people. Not exactly a lost Stone Age Bornean tribe in their differences from the rest of us, but with enough uniqueness to mark some lines between here and there. For others, the loss of Tangier would be just another manifestation of the ongoing global warming that is raising sea levels and making much of the planet hotter, and much of our weather harsher. The question posed by this book is whether the island is worth saving, given that saving it will entail a considerable public investment. [image] A backyard of a home on Tangier Island gives way to marsh, a trend affecting more and more homes, as erosion, land subsidence and sea level rise afflict the island. Photo taken on Saturday, July 1, 2017 – image and text from The Virginian-Pilot – by Steve Earley To inform our answers Earl Swift spent considerable time on the island getting to know its residents, learn the local culture, patois, values, personalities, values, beliefs, and concerns. His more deskbound research offers us both a history of the place and a look at the climatic and geological conditions that seem certain to doom Tangier to a watery grave. The value of the island, and related islands is not just the human history and culture that is at risk. There are natural features that impact the survival not only of local avian life, but the underwater fauna and flora that support a wide range of species, including the blue crab and oyster. There is value to sustaining existing environments and species, for environmental, aesthetic, and commercial reasons. If (when) this island disappears, how will its loss affect the Chesapeake Bay blue crabs that fill so many bellies? How will that loss affect the men and women who bring this renewable resource to our tables? If the potential crab harvest is severely reduced there will be secondary impact, as the shutting down of a significant economic force sends waves through the adjacent economies. What about, for instance, the truckers who deliver crabs and oysters from the Tangier watermen to the rest of the nation, the shops and restaurants that depend on them for customers and product? [image] The Amanda Lee, a typical Tangier workboat – image from OutsideOnLine.com - photo credit Matt Eich In reading Chesapeake Requiem, you will pick up some terminology, will learn to differentiate a jimmy from a sook from a peeler, and appreciate the significance of a sponge on a crab. What might a progger be, or a come-here? What is a doubler, and what are the differences between jumbos, primes, hotels, and mediums, and what is a sugar toad? It is also a place where, when a couple learned that their adopted Asian children had been taken from their birth parents illegally, they gave the kids the chance to meet their biological parents, and choose where to live. [image] Image from The Virginia-Pilot It is a place where an overzealous cop shot a kid for violating a blue law when he was buying his mother milk on a Sunday. It is also a place where someone later shot dead the cop who had been convicted of a crime for that action, but who had been subsequently pardoned. No one will say who. It is a place where being a cop is a considerable challenge when everyone who calls in a complaint is a friend or relative and every one they are calling about is a friend or relative. It is a place where, when a pastor, who was deemed insufficiently conservative left the Methodist church and started his own parish, he was vandalized by locals. Outside intervention was needed to make the attacks stop. And when the national Methodist Church expressed support for Palestinians wanting their own state, member of the local Methodist church rebelled, creating a schism. [image] From New Yorker article - photo by Gorden Campbell It is a place where, when one of their most respected captains went down in a stormy sea, fifty boats launched into awful conditions, Dunkirk–like, to try to rescue him. It is also a place where flinty boat owners sometimes skimped on known needed repairs or safety equipment to their own peril, and the endangerment of those seeking to come to their aid. It is a place where a clothing factory that employed mostly women was burned to the ground when the local men were put off by the independence this new employment provided to the island women. It is a place where the vast majority of land-based jobs are held by women, and the vast majority of water-based jobs are held by men. It is a place where plans to build a seawall to protect the island keep getting buried under years of studies, funding denials at federal, state and local levels, and presidential impediments. [image] Wind and waves have ravaged Tangier, including the island’s public beach, shown here – image from The Virginia-Pilot – photo by Steve Eearley It is a place that welcomes newcomers guardedly, and has benefited mightily from some of the advances those invasive species brought with them. But it is a place that becomes toxic and shunning when those outsiders do not fully accept all the local norms. As individuals, the islanders are fiercely independent and self-sufficient—modern-day cowboys, or so they like to think. As a group, however, they show precious little initiative.It is a place where a man called Ooker knows the local ospreys by name, and feeds them, where feral cats abound, where if you have seen a squirrel on the island, it is really the squirrel, not a squirrel. It is a place where a respect for the land is not always obvious. …objectively speaking, islanders were poor stewards of their island and its waters. The marshes were studded with their discarded kitchen appliances, bicycles. And outboard motors. Litter made eyesores of the ridges. Watermen routinely threw trash, including motor oil, overboard; the harbor’s shallows had acquired a sharp-smelling and colorful sheen. And Tangiermen had nothing but enmity for environmentalists, who warned that the bay’s blue crab population was overfished, teetering on collapse, and would rebound only with tighter regulation of the commercial harvest.[image] Cameron Evans, 17, looks for artifacts from Canaan, one of the communities that once existed on Uppards. This stretch of shoreline, about a 10-minute boat ride from tangier Island’s harbor, has been receding at a rate of 15 feet or more a year recently – image from The Virgina-Pilot – photo by Steve Earley – Friday, June 30, 2017 It is a place that has survived an invasion of parasites that almost wiped out the oyster crop entirely, a place where limits on crab takes were routinely ignored, forcing the state to intervene to keep the resource from being wiped out. It is a book that generates few gripes. I recommend that if you are poring through this on or near a digital device, you keep a window open with a map of the islands. It makes it much easier to track where things are while reading. Of course, the full, hardcover edition may offer more visual aids than did the ARE I read for this review, so take that concern with a grain of sea salt. At 380 pps it felt long, but not terribly so. I did think, though, that at times there might have been too much local culture. That made it seem a bit longer. But not much else. Swift is a gifted writer, with a smooth style, a keen eye for detail, and a very useful ability to get up close with people he started out hardly knowing. [image] An old deadrise workboat sits in a marsh at Tangier island. The island’s three ridges, where people live, are not much more than 4 feet above sea level – image and caption from The Virginia-Pilot – photo by Steve Earley – taken July 1, 2017 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. OR, you could see the entire, unchopped-up review, as it is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews, all in one piece. Stop by and say Hi! [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Aug 06, 2018
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Aug 06, 2018
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Hardcover
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0062802186
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| 4.25
| 18,826
| Apr 10, 2018
| Apr 10, 2018
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really liked it
| Consider the testimony of a well-educated but not politically minded German who experienced the rise of the Third Reich: Consider the testimony of a well-educated but not politically minded German who experienced the rise of the Third Reich:Comedian Jeff Foxworthy has made a career of a single comedic line, “You might be a redneck.” A few samples from the site Country Humor: -----If you ever cut your grass and found a car, you might be a redneck. -----If you own a home that is mobile and five cars that aren’t… you just might be a redneck. ----If you own a homemade fur coat…if you clean your fingernails with a stick…if birds are attracted to your beard, and so on. It might make a pretty good hook for Madeleine Albright in her consideration of Fascism and the peril we all face from it today. She begins by facing the fact that there does not appear to be a universally accepted definition of the word. She put the question to her graduate class of two dozen, resulting in a Foxworthy worthy list (albeit a serious one) of characteristics that herd leaders (we are looking primarily at leaders here) into the Fascist corral or some other. [image] Madeleine Albright - image from The Christian Science Monitor - she passed away in 2022 ----- If you claim that your in-group, whether based on religion, ethnicity or race, is deserving and those outside the in-group are not, you might be a fascist. Albright offers an eye-opening look at the history of the word, how it was used, by whom and to what ends. [her students] began from the ground up, naming the characteristics that were, to their minds, most closely associated with the word. “A mentality of ‘us against them,’” offered one. Another ticked off “nationalist, authoritarian, antidemocratic.” A third emphasized the violent aspect. A fourth wondered why Fascism was almost always considered right-wing, arguing, “Stalin was as much a Fascist as Hitler.”It is not only applicable to far right sorts who pine for a corporatist authoritarian state. There were leftists in Italy advocating a dictatorship of the dispossessed who called themselves Fascists, as did even Italian centrists (of a sort) who espoused a monarchy. The premier fascists of the 20th century, the Nazi Party, in addition to their wildly inhumane views, advocated for more generous pensions, an end to child labor and better maternal healthcare. Clearly the term is not limited by ideology. Maybe it has more to do with methodologies for seizing power. ----- If you provoke and nurture hatred toward those you oppose, and aim to get revenge for wrongs real or imagined, you might be a fascist. She notes that the word has been tossed about far too loosely to target those to whom one is opposed, regardless of actual political or tactical leanings, rendering it relatively, and sadly, meaningless. Still another noted that Fascism is often linked to people who are part of a distinct ethnic or racial group, who are under economic stress, and who feel that they are being denied rewards to which they are entitled. “It’s not so much what people have,” she said, “but what they think they should have—and what they fear.” Fear is why Fascism’s emotional reach can extend to all levels of society. No political movement can grow without popular support, but Fascism is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street—on those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.Albright offers insightful analysis of the origins of fascism, noting in particular its 20th century originator and his prize student. But there were plenty more who found authoritarianism appealing, whether they fit the definition of fascist or not. In fact, Albright offers a survey of many of the 20th century’s all-star team for egregious leadership. Some names will be familiar. You know the Italian, the German and probably the Spaniard, but are likely to be less familiar with organizations and leaders in other countries. Like the Arrow Cross group in Hungary, or movements in France, Iceland, and Romania. The Czech fascist, Itenlein, allowing Hitler to use him to broadcast lies about mistreatment in the country, giving Hitler cover necessary to justify invading. Or The Bund in the USA. -----If you attempt to tear down the governing institutions and electoral processes as biased and unfair, but only if you don’t win, you just may be a fascist. Albright writes of her personal experience with such dark forces, her family having been driven out of her native Czechoslovakia. Her grandmother was among twenty six family members murdered by Nazis. The story of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia holds lessons that still need absorbing. Good guys don’t always win, especially when they are divided and less determined than their adversaries. The desire for liberty may be ingrained in every human breast, but so is the potential for complacency, confusion, and cowardice. And losing has a price. After 1948, Czechoslovakia had no room for democrats. In that Kafkaesque environment, the Czechs who had devoted every hour of World War II to fighting Hitler from London were accused of having spent their days instead plotting to enslave the working class.She writes about dark days in US history when Joe McCarthy held the stage, and notes many similarities between Joe and you-know-who. -----If you refuse to accept defeat at the polls, insisting, with no proof, that the results are flawed, you might be a fascist. She continues with a look at the many dictators abroad in the world today and in the recent past. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is given considerable ink. She also writes about Erdogan of Turkey, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland, Duterte of the Philippines and a cast of the usual suspects known to those who read the international news. She notes in particular how they feed on each other’s energy, copying tactics, and using the excesses of leaders elsewhere to justify their excesses at home. Duterte and El Sissi in Egypt, for example, took great comfort in the public support they received from Swamp Thing. Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was “bully,” and on the day of the Normandy invasion, Franklin Roosevelt prayed to the Almighty for a “peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men.” By contrast, President Trump’s eyes light up when strongmen steamroll opposition, brush aside legal constraints, ignore criticism, and do whatever it takes to get their way.-----If you brag about your ability to solve all problems, despite the absence of any supporting evidence, you might be a fascist. She saves Putin and Kim Jong-Un for last. Albright had dealings with Putin in person, and has an interesting take on him. She finds a surprising (and unpersuasive, IMHO) reason for considering him something less than an all-out fascist. And is surprising again in finally revealing who she considers an actual fascist among the contemporary candidates and who she does not. -----If you fill up on supporters’ cheers by going all macho and threatening violence against your enemies, you just night be a fascist. She looks at larger policy issues that might be helping to create conditions conducive to the rise of fascism and international policy directions that have headed it off in the past. And, unsurprisingly for someone who has been the US representative to the UN, the US Secretary of State, someone who has written and teaches on international relations, she is a strong advocate for international agreements, for diplomacy as a way of reducing the power of nationalistic movements by providing economic and security benefits from multi-lateral cooperation. -----If you regard the press as an enemy of the state, and persistently and knowingly attempt to undermine honest reporting as false, you just night be a fascist. She began this book long before the 2016 election, and would have written it anyway. The rightward drift in the world has been going on for a while, a response, at least in part, to the impact of globalization and increasing automation on employment, to the massive refugee crises that have thrown cultures together in ways that are often problematic, and frightening. But, as she writes, The shadow looming over these pages is, of course, that of Donald Trump. He is president because he convinced enough voters in the right states that he was a teller of blunt truths, a masterful negotiator, and an effective champion of American interests. That he is none of those things should disturb our sleep, but there is a larger cause for unease. Trump is the first anti- democratic president in modern U.S. history. On too many days, beginning in the early hours, he flaunts his disdain for democratic institutions, the ideals of equality and social justice, civil discourse, civic virtues, and America itself. If transplanted to a country with fewer democratic safeguards, he would audition for dictator, because that is where his instincts lead.It can be no coincidence that many of the actions, beliefs, and attitudes manifested by known fascists from the past and on the world stage today are present in Swamp Thing. In addition to being the most corrupt president our nation has ever endured, he would love nothing more than to cast aside all of our democratic institutions and rule solely by fiat. -----If you think that the resources of the world, regardless of location, are yours for the taking, you just night be a fascist. While I found great value in Fascism: a Warning, I had a few gripes. If one writes a book about such a considerable subject, it behooves to come up with an actual definition. I found Albright’s methodology of defining fascism by its constituent manifestations a bit squishy, calling to mind the tale of blind men touching an elephant trying to describe the beast. Yes, she does distill down to a short def at the end, but it felt unsatisfying. On today’s world stage it seems that China merits more attention than was given here, particularly as China’s current president, Xi Jinping, has essentially made himself ruler for life. But overall, there is much to love in this book, fascinating detail about the nature and origins of fascism, some history that was new to me about relations among Mussolini, Hitler and Franco, more new knowledge about other fascistic sorts in less central nations in the 20th century and a pretty good survey of who the creatures are that we should be wary of today. Swamp Thing may or may not be a fascist, but -----If you walk like a fascist, talk like a fascist, think the rules do not apply to you; if you seek to destroy the democratic institutions of your nation, solely to serve your own personal ends; if you foment racism, violence, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and racial intolerance; if you constantly lie to the people of your country; if you seek to destroy the credibility of news organizations to inoculate yourself against them reporting to the nation about your crimes; if you knowingly collude with foreign powers to undermine your country’s electoral process; if you sell public policy, domestic and foreign, to the highest bidder…you just might be a fascist. Review first posted – 6/8/18 Publication date – 4/10/18 [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages Items of Interest -----Back in 2015, Trevor Noah on the Daily Show totally nailed who Trump really is. This is must see if you have not been there already and still wonderful even if you have already seen it. - Trump as African Dictator -----June 22, 2018 - NY Times - Definitely worth checking out - Trickle Down Trumpsters and the Debasement of Language by Timothy Egan After a while, people come to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” wrote Hannah Arendt, the German-born philosopher, in describing how truth lost its way in her native land.-----October 15, 2018 - A nice short video that puts the current danger into historical context - If You’re Not Scared About Fascism in the U.S., You Should Be -----December 31, 2018 - NY Times - Why Trump Reigns as King Cyrus - by Katherine Stewart - a very frightening look at how the evangelical right views Trump and justifies his many crimes -----February 22, 2019 - Atlantic Magazine - The Alarming Scope of the President's Emergency Powers - by Elizabeth Goitein - When push comes to prosecute or impeach, do you really expect Trump to accede to the rule of law? This alarming article points out the many tools available to Swamp Thing that might be misused to keep his crooked ass out of jail. Be afraid. Be very afraid. -----March 7, 2019 - NY Times - Nicholas Kristof offers an optimistic perspective on the unlikelihood of a Trump Reich - We Will Survive. Probably. -----March 14, 2019 - NY Times - Donald Trump’s Bikers Want to Kick Protester Ass - building a brownshirt militia - this is really bad -----But Lawrence O'Brien thinks it's just gas. Sure hope he's right. -----November, 2016 (but first sen by me on 3/20/19) - Open Culture - Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism -----May 10, 2019 - This is what it might look like in action - Daily Beast -Here’s a Preview of America’s 2020 Nightmare if Trump Loses - by Michael Tomasky Interviews ----- The Atlantic - Episode 20 – April 18, 2018 – 39 minutes – Albright take on directly the question of whether Swamp Thing is or isn’t. -----C-Span – David Ignatius of the Washington Post interviews Albright – Video – one hour – a lot on North Korea ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 03, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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978052556251
| 4.17
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it was amazing
| I think people are very familiar with the American heroes of the story—or antiheroes if you like—whether it’s Paul Manafort or Carter Page or Donald T I think people are very familiar with the American heroes of the story—or antiheroes if you like—whether it’s Paul Manafort or Carter Page or Donald Trump Jr. But they are less familiar with the Russians. And what we’re talking about here is an alleged conspiracy with two halves. What I wanted to try and illuminate was what the Russians were doing. And I wanted it to be contextual, to explain that if you really want to interpret what happened last year [2016] in America, you need to go backwards almost through a kind of wormhole toward Cold War times and you need to be a sort of student of espionage, and in particular of the KGB method. I wanted to marry some of the contemporaneous stuff that we’ve seen in the news with my own reporting from Moscow. It’s also important to look at how the KGB used to do things in order to understand Vladimir Putin and his methods. Putin operates in the manner of a classic KGB-trained spy. He uses strategies of subterranean influence that were tried and tested during the ’60s and ’70s under [then–Soviet Secretary General] Leonid Brezhnev and so on. I wanted to pull that together. - From The Nation interviewAll roads lead to Moscow. In addition to the media frenzy stirred up by Stormy Daniels and her 60 Minutes interview, the buzz this week is still on for the newly released Russian Roulette, another in the flood of books on Swamp Thing, and his history of questionable, illegal, and traitorous entanglements, particularly those involving a certain mafiacratic descendant of the former Soviet Union. Yes, we have that book at home, and will be getting there, but you may not have noticed that back in November 2017 (or four years in Trump time) another book was released that covered a lot of the same territory, Collusion. I would have called it Yes, Collusion!, but that’s just me. [image] Luke Harding - image from 5x15.com When it comes to covering events relating to Russia, Luke Harding has been there and done that. He was the Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian, an English newspaper of note. In an earlier book by Harding, Expelled, also released as The Mafia State, he reports on his time in Russia from 2007 to 2011. I heartily recommend checking this book out to get a fuller flavor of just what sort of monster Puty is, to pick up some clues as to what lies hidden for now, and get a notion of what may lie ahead. Harding was booted out of Russia due to his coverage, revealing maybe a bit too much of the truth about what was going on among corrupt state officials. He has kept up his reporting, both for The Guardian and in books, offering works on Edward Snowden, on the murder of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, on Wikileaks, and on other related topics. [image] Christopher Steele - image from The New Yorker - by Victoria Jones Collusion looks at the history of connections between Trump, his family and Americans working for and associated with him, and people and institutions in and of Russia. He relies considerably, but not exclusively on the now-famous dossier put together by English private spook Christopher Steele, on further information from Steele, and on information from his own contacts. In doing this, he describes how contemporary intelligence work is done, some of it at least, the bit about developing potential foreign assets, and makes a compelling case that Swamp Thing is not only connected to Putin, bigly, but is vulnerable to Russian blackmail, with damaging impact on US national security. [image] What a tangled web we weave – image from a March/April 2017 Politico article by Michael Crowley - All of Trump’s Russia Ties, in 7 Charts One of the most interesting elements of the book is the history of the Russian connection. Trump had been on Russian radar since 1977 when he married Ivana, a Czechoslovakian. They kept an eye on him through the 1980s. It grew beyond just watching to an earnest interest in 1987, when he was wooed (heaping helpings of flattery were involved) by Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet representative to the UN, to visit Moscow. we can't say that Trump was recruited in 1987. But what we can say with absolute certainty is there was a very determined effort by the Soviets to bring him over, and that moreover, his personality was the kind of thing they were looking for. They were looking for narcissists. They were looking for people who were kind of - dare I say it - corruptible, interested in money, people who were not necessarily faithful in their marriages and also sort of opportunists who were not very strong analysts or principle people. And if you work your way down the list through these sort of - the KGB's personality questionnaire, Donald Trump ticks every single box. - from the NPR interview[image] Carter Page speaking at the RIA Novosti news agency in Russia – image by Grigoriy Sisoev Many of Harding’s chapters follow some of the names we have all come to know and loathe. There is a chapter on Carter Page, titled “I Think He’s an Idiot,” which is a quote from one of the Russians to whom Page is linked. One item of interest is the suggestion that Page, in payment for services rendered to Russian entities, was given inside information on a coming privatization of Russian gas company Rosneft, and a message for Trump, that the Russians had compromising material on him. [image] On December 10, 2015 General Michael Kelly and Jill Stein were guests at Vladimir Putin’s table for an event marking the 10th anniversary of state-owned TV network Russia Today - image from AP, by Mikhail Klimentyev The chapter titled “General Misha” looks at General Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russia, and explores his possible motives for working with the other side. “General Misha” is how Flynn referred to himself in at least one communication with his Russian colleagues. The chapter on Paul Manafort, “He Does Bastards,” quotes another source on how Manafort seems drawn to the worst national leaders to assist. There are alarming parallels, by the way, between Manafort’s Ukrainian client, Viktor Yanukovych, and Donald Trump. Both are thugs who got a political makeover from a professional candidate-polisher. Both are remarkably corrupt. Both have authoritarian intentions. Both want to lock up their opposition. Yanukovych actually locked up his political opponents. Swamp Thing must make do with penal envy for now. Yanukovych stole billions from Ukraine. It remains to be seen how much Trump and his fellow looters will have stolen from the American people by the time they are driven out of the country or into jail. Yanokovuch was ultimately booted out in a popular uprising, and now resides, with his billions, in Russia. One can only hope that our corrupt leader is held to account for his crimes. [image] Viktor Yanukovych and Paul Manafort - image from The Daily Beast In addition to looking at the specific individuals involved, Harding offers digestible chunks of history. Of great interest is how Russia has grown a cyber warfare capability that exists outside the official government structure. He examines the various ways in which Russian oligarch money finds its way to the West, with particular focus on money laundering through Deutsche Bank and the Bank of Cyprus, and how vast sums of Russian money passed into and through Trump’s real estate developments, gaining Trump not only huge loans at a time when American banks had learned the hard way not to loan him any money, but vast profits. He offers keen insight into the relationship between nominally private institutions and Putin’s government. He looks at the efforts by Steele, domestic intelligence agencies, and foreign intelligence services to inform the FBI what was going on with Trump before the election, and on the bureau sitting on the fact that they were looking into it, while the sainted Mister Comey was doing his best to tilt the election to Trump by making damaging public statements about Hilary Clinton in an October Surprise political hit. Harding looks at the impact of BuzzFeed publishing the entire Steele dossier, while so many other news organizations sat on the info that they all had. Trump’s connection with Russia is a national thriller/action-adventure/comedy/horror/surreality show we are all watching at the same time. But just as the after-show gab-fests that follow popular programs can open our eyes to things we might have missed in what we just saw (I am a total junkie for After Trek, which follows Star_Trek:_Discovery), books like Harding’s can fill in details that we may have missed the first or the first several times we read sundry books on the unraveling horrors, read and/or watched the news and/or the political talk shows, or listened to podcasts. [image] Bosom Buddies - image from CNBC – by John Harwood It seems likely that Robert Mueller has had to install extra sprinklers, offer his staff gas masks, and reinforce the concrete in his offices to cope with the growing store of smoking guns he and his staff have been collecting. But that is not what Luke Harding is offering here. Collusion brings together a diverse range of relevant information in one place. This is what is going on. These are the players. This is how it came to be. If you cannot detect the scent of combustion in this national crisis, you are probably determined not to. Harding points our noses in the proper directions, offers some post-episode explanations, and provides hints as to where the series is heading. We will all be affected by the outcome, whether or not we are tuned in. It is better to know. Published – November 16, 2017 Review Posted – March 30, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Has been moved to comment #1 - looks like GR reduced the allowable character count for reviews. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 2018
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Mar 20, 2018
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Mar 01, 2018
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Paperback
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0062796755
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| 3.88
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| Jan 16, 2018
| Jan 16, 2018
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really liked it
| Democracy dies in darkness, opines a great American newspaper, but it would be more accurate to say that it dies by degrees. Where constitutional Democracy dies in darkness, opines a great American newspaper, but it would be more accurate to say that it dies by degrees. Where constitutional democracy has been lost, it has been lost because political actors have broken its rules turn by turn to achieve some immediately urgent goal. Each rule breaking then justifies the next, in a cycle of revenge that ends only in the formal or informal abrogation of the constitutional order.David Frum pisses me off. He is not someone I would normally read. He is a die-hard Republican political commentator, who served as a speechwriter in the Dubyah administration, wrote for the right-wing-toxic editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, was an editor on the neo-conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, as well as being a regular opinion contributor on NPR and MSNBC, the latter being where I got a bit more exposure to his views. His Reaganaut take on government is not particularly in synch with mine, but he is among the many, of both red and blue inclination, who find the Trump presidency existentially alarming. More importantly, beyond the distaste any thinking person has for Swamp Thing, Frum is concerned about the road the nation has traveled in allowing such a travesty to take place, and the ability of so many to stand silent, or even to abet, as small-d democratic norms are routinely treated like an attractive woman The Orange One just cornered in an elevator. [image] David Frum - image from Front Page Magazine In terms of factual material, there is not a lot that is new here, for those who keep up with the news. Of course, the daily news churn is so fast and voluminous that it is impossible to keep up with it all. As a result, there is certain to be material in Trumpocracy that is news to you. The danger Frum sees is not the rise of an autocratic, constitution-burning strongman, but a crumbling of the institutional norms that have made the USA, flawed, though it may be, a democracy worth preserving. The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, [clearly, he should have been more afraid of this] but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters. Trump operates not by strategy, but by instinct. His great skill is to sniff his opponents’ vulnerabilities: “low energy,” “little,” “crooked,” “fake.” In the same way, Trump has intuited weak points in the American political system and in American political culture. Trump gambled that Americans resent each other’s differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far, that gamble has paid off. (well, until the 2020 election, anyway)This is less a book about Trump, the person, and more about the underlying currents that have floated him to the surface of the swamp. Where Fire and Fury was a gossipy look at the personal goings on in the White House, Frum’s book is an intellectual analysis of social and political changes, their impacts, and their implications. He begins with a look at the history of increasing partisanship, citing back and forth pulls from left and right. Frum sees the end of the Cold War as the condition that allowed the parties to commence a further divergence, the shock of the Great Recession as generating a smaller pie, with more competition for the slices, continuing rage over Bush v. Gore, and accelerating ethnic and cultural diversity. Unfortunately, there are instances where the obfuscatory urge clearly overwhelmed and Frum manages to omit some relevant points while making this or that case, devolving to GOP talking points. Bush v. Gore was a judicial travesty, and not one that anyone should forget, ever. It reinforced the notion that corruption rules, the voters be damned. The Great Recession may have taken a slice out of the American pie but some slices are bigger than others. Wall Street, largely responsible for the disaster, got bailed out, except for a few early crash-and-burns, while homeowners got thrown out. Jobs continued to be lost by the hundreds of thousands while profitability, after a dip in 2009, did just fine. And as for diminishing the pie, that may have been true in the short term, but in the years since, the pie has grown large and flavorful, but only the well-to-do have been given forks. Of course corporate profits as a percentage of GDP have gone up while corporate taxes over the same period have fallen as a percent of GDP. As he acknowledges this later, it seems odd that he would cite competition over reduced resources as a rationale for political divergence. Citing an absence of Obama willingness to compromise with Republicans eager to kill Obamacare, he manages to omit the fact that it was Republican legislators who had essentially refused to negotiate, despite pleas from the president. It was purely a one-sided crime. I call BS! He decries all-or-nothing politics as if both sides were equally at fault. While making an interesting point about the legality of DACA and the president’s diverse views on that, Frum then offers another misleading item about the Democratic party being unable to pass immigration legislation despite being in the majority at the time, which, of course, ignores the fact that a majority was meaningless when the opposition was committed to filibustering anything Democrats proposed. He cites Democratic refusal to approve ten of Dubyah’s appellate court judgeship nominations. Fails to mention that Dubyah had diverged from tradition in dumping the usual procedure of submitting nominee names to the ABA for their review prior to official submission. Also, the GOP ditched another tradition. It had been the case that Appeals Court nominations were submitted to both Senators of the state in which the seat was located. And if either Senator objected the nomination was quashed. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch decided that henceforth it would require rejection of a nominee by both senators to kill an appointment. Hatch would then go ahead and ignore his own rule when it conflicted with his political goals, holding hearings on nominees even after both Senators from some appellate seat states withheld their ok, if he wanted that nominee installed. Rules are, apparently, only for the minority party. Frum also neglects to mention that Republicans had killed the nominations of several Clinton era candidates, so a bit of payback was to be expected. And then there were the nominees who were clearly well outside the mainstream of legal thought at the time. Also, Frum does not mention that Dubyah had sixty-one Appeals Court judges approved. So, painting with a wide brush is less revelatory than it is obfuscatory. And he then uses this as an excuse for Mitch McConnell refusing to bring to a vote Obama’s choice to fill the SCOTUS seat opened by the death of Antonin Scalia. I call BS! (I have added a link in EXTRA STUFF to an interesting article that offers some detail on the Appeals Court nominees issue.) Despite his issues on broad-brushing issues like those above, Frum is clear-eyed about more things than one might have expected. His take on the continuing attempt to overturn Obama Care is spot on. He also rightly points out that the benefits of our expanding economy have devolved mainly to those already middle class or higher, with little or no benefit accruing to the poor and working class. He is, after all, a guy who was kicked out of his gig at the American Enterprise Institute for daring to tell Republicans that they were wasting their time opposing Obamacare and should look to making it better. Frum decries what he sees as a rising tolerance for violence. Somehow equating Occupy Wall Street with the white guy who showed up at an Obama rally with a loaded rifle in 2009. He mentions that dozens of rifles were carried at a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas, but makes no mention of how many unarmed blacks were killed by armed police. I take his overall point that there has been a general increase in violence in the political sphere, (although crime statistics report a decrease in violent crime overall) but the Occupy leaders, to the extent that there were any, rejected the actions of extremists who parasited onto that movement and others, to vent their kinetic spleens. That it occurred at all should not necessarily be taken as evidence that it was actually “tolerated.” And how about Charlottesville, where the white supremacists were planning violence on counter protesters. It seems somewhat tilted to view the people who went to Charlottesville to protect peaceful demonstrators from right wing thugs as the equivalent of those very thugs. Violence on the left has been episodic, with the intrusion of dark elements into otherwise peaceful undertakings, whereas violence and increasing armament on the right has been encouraged by the NRA, and a need to resort to violence to defend against imagined threats has been encouraged by a wide swath of right-wing psycho media. So, while I agree with Frum that there seems a rising tolerance for political violence, it is primarily on the right. Leaders of progressive actions typically reject violent methods. So, for another false equivalence, I call BS! Frum quite correctly points to enablers who allow Trump to be Trump to the detriment of us all, particularly our bear-like enemy abroad, and GOP members more than happy to promote known lies to further political ends. He offers a sharp, if depressing look at the Trump plunder machine A rule-of law state can withstand a certain amount of official corruption. What it cannot withstand is a culture of impunity. So long as officials believe that corruption will usually be detected—and if detected, then certainly punished—for just that long they will believe that corruption is wrong. It is for this reason that corrupt regimes swiftly evolve toward authoritarianism, and authoritarian regimes toward corruption.It was certainly clear that the Republican Quislings in Congress would do nothing to stop Swamp Thing from siphoning as much of the national treasure into the accounts of his family and friends as possible, which differentiates the USA from any banana republic how? But Frum notes an international trend toward kleptocracy, as a non-ideological form of awfulness. Makes one wonder if we are better off with a morally challenged, insecurity and greed driven narcissist bent on stealing everything he can grab, or his potential replacement, a religious ideologue, who thinks God speaks to him directly. Frum points out the obvious betrayals Swamp Thing has engaged in, the back-stabbing of erstwhile supporters, the campaign promises laid waste. But then he wanders off into a discussion of deficits that returns us to the missing information methodology that seems to permeate his writing. He gripes about deficits soaring after the Bush administration, yet makes no mention of why it soared. Wonder why that could be. Hmmm. Maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with the fact that Dubyah and the Republican-supported (with some Democratic help from Bill Clinton) policy of financial industry de-regulation had allowed Wall Street to run roughshod over sanity and cause the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Maybe Frum neglected to note that the amount Obama wound up having to spend to forestall a repeat of the Great Depression was remarkably similar to the amounts that Dubyah himself had proposed before running as fast as he could away from the mess that he’d made. One can only presume that there is dishonesty at play here. Because David Frum is not, unlike Trump, an idiot. And then he offers a cogent analysis of why the Trump White House is such a bedlam. He also understands that Paul Ryan’s economic program is distilled madness, leavened with a Trumpian capacity for cruelty. Frum gets that the Republican bubble has become incapable of considering facts beyond the bubble’s border. Even more alarmingly, he notes that instead of de-regulating industries by reducing state involvement as prior presidents had done, Trump sought to break the state in order to plunder it. His analysis of how Trump treats the press and even truth itself is incisive and frightening. Frum’s policy solutions, aside from the whole raging authoritarian thing, are a sure cure for low blood pressure. He says, for example, that Tax subsidies for college tuition incentivize above-inflation fee increases. And there is probably some truth there. But since Republicans seem hell bent on reducing any form of overt subsidy to actual humans, this would mean that only the well-to-do would have access to higher education. Unless the GOP is eager for a return to heads being lopped in town squares by enraged peasants, it might be wiser to come up with ways to make college affordable for working people, whether that means (heaven forfend!) price controls on higher education, direct subsidies to those unable to afford such a critical means of educational, economic and social advancement, or tax incentives, which really only work for people who already have enough income to take advantage of such things. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that, I moved it, including the c0nclusion of the review and EXTRA STUFF, to the comments section directly below. But wait, there's more. In 2021, Goodreads decreed that it would no longer allow external links in comments, and if there are any in an existing comment, updates of said comment are disallowed. I will be pulling it all together and posting the unified review on my site, Coot’s Reviews [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] In February, 2022, I made some minor edits and reposted this review. Will port to Coot's ASAP. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 05, 2018
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Feb 20, 2018
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Feb 20, 2018
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ebook
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1250158060
| 9781250158062
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| 3.44
| 75,907
| Jan 05, 2018
| Jan 05, 2018
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it was amazing
| MUELLER IS COMING! MUELLER IS COMING!Michael Wolff has given us a drone’s (dragon’s?) eye view of the competing centers vying to be the power behind the throne, with some looking, in the longer term, at carving paths for their own succession to the highest position in the realm. There is a mad king who needs to be handled. Centers of power arise, morph, wage battles both silent and overt, succeed and fail, rise, die, and sometimes rise again. What we see in Michael Wolff’s Fire and The juicy bits of this book have been everywhere for the last few weeks. It is highly quotable, and the publisher, Holt, the author, their PR people, and the major news outlets have been flooding the zone. Whether on-line or in print, over airwaves on TV or radio, through cable, and probably via the deep-state-news (WDSN?) that beams directly into peoples’ minds, all media have been all agog with the many looks at this elephant to which they have been privy. With so much blanket coverage coming at you, one might be forgiven for wondering whether you first saw the item you just read in the book, or came across it somewhere else. It is a little bit unnerving. I will spare you the further confusion of adding all those bits here. I really have to put some in, though. I mean you know them already, right? How many synonyms can you find for idiot? Fire and Fury is the biggest book of the moment, the Wall Street Journal reporting that it had sold a million copies as of Monday, January 8, 2018, a day earlier than its scheduled release. Remains to be seen, of course, with a steady stream of books on Trump being published, how long this frenzy will persist. But the last time I was aware of people standing on line for hours to get a book, it included the words Harry and Potter. This book, in the words of our former vice president, is a big fucking deal. [image] Michael Wolff - image from Mediaite.com The bottom line of Fire and Fury is that it presents Donald Trump as unfit to serve as president, based not on the dark view and negative press of his opposition, but the been-there-OMG-did-you-see-that experience of his own staff and supporters. Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact that it appeared he knew nothing. There was simply no subject, other than perhaps building construction, that he had substantially mastered.Wolff uses named and unnamed sources. It seems clear that his primary go-to was one Steve Bannon, a weaver of webs, a bomb-thrower, a snake in the grass, a back-stabber, a manipulator, a white supremacist, a gifted media manipulator, and a pretty bright and articulate, if sartorially challenged guy. One might be tempted to dismiss Wolff’s book based on this reliance. Don’t. There are plenty of other sources feeding the narrative. The question is whether the image Wolff generates by making a composite of the incoming bits makes sense. Is it plausible? Is it correct? Having seen Wolff interviewed on multiple news and entertainment shows, and attending to the back-and-forths between him and knowledgeable news people, it seems eminently clear that he got it right. There are probably some details that err a bit here and there. Maybe this person was not at that meeting, or a date may be off. I expect that the only inaccuracies to be found here will be of that sort. Niggling, beside the point. And blown way out of proportion by those with an interest in distracting you from the core content of the book. That the president attempted to stop its publication should tell you something. What was, to many of the people who knew Trump well, much more confounding was that he had managed to win this election, and arrive at this ultimate accomplishment, wholly lacking what in some obvious sense must be the main requirement of the job, what neuroscientists would call executive function. He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.Michael Wolff is a veteran author and journalist, with seven prior books to his credit. He has been nominated for the National Magazine Award three times, and accused by people he has written about of fabricating. The absence of actual lawsuits against him suggests that complaints were less than firmly grounded. He is a serious writer and should be taken seriously. It is a bit mind-boggling the access he had to the actual White House, but he lays it out. He hung out in the WH, with a huge degree of access and was able to get input from the people working or passing through there, for months. Was the administration insane for allowing this? You betcha. But they did, another sign of their unpreparedness. Inauguration day offered a look at what was to come. Much of the sixteen-minute speech was part of Bannon’s daily joie de guerre patter—his take-back-the-country America-first, carnage-everywhere vision for the country. But it actually became darker and more forceful when filtered through Trump’s disappointment and delivered with his golf face. The administration purposely began on a tone of menace—a Bannon-driven message to the other side that the country was about to undergo profound change. Trump’s wounded feelings—his sense of being shunned and unloved on the very day he became president—helped send that message. When he came off the podium after delivering his address, he kept repeating, “Nobody will forget this speech.”As noted above, the geography through which Wolff’s tale travels is one of sundry kingdoms. I could not help but imagine the opening credits of Game of Thrones as we approach each power center, the models for each of the city-states animating, offering moving, 3-D representations of each kingdom’s imagery and motifs. The three (sadly, not seven) are the alt-right of Bannon and his allies (clearly White Walkers), the mainstream GOP crowd epitomized by Reince Preibus, and the family wing, considered by Bannon to be of a liberal-democratic bent, in the person of Jared Kushner and the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, aka Jarvanka. (Cersei and Jamie?). [image] Swamp Thing as Joffrey Baratheon- image from DesignCrowd.com, by way of Huff-Po The forward motion of the story is the events of Trump’s campaign, but mostly presidency up to October, 2017. I know, I know. One of the problems with political books is that they can often be outdated in fairly short order. The several months between October and the book’s publication is a lifetime in Trump years. It is impressive, given the daily churning of personnel and events in the DC universe (not the multiverse) these days that any book on Trumplandia still has relevance by the time ink on paper makes its way to readers. And yet, the issues raised here, the main issue, is momentous, and sticks. Wolff has offered a host of quotes from his sources, many named, that question Swamp Thing’s competence, not just to function as president, but to function as a human being. His own staff frequently mention the applicability of the 25th amendment (although in the real world that is a total fantasy) and the likelihood of impeachment. The sound of Robert Mueller’s approaching steps echoes throughout the work, clearly feeding Trump’s paranoia about being treated unfairly, and boosting his fear of being found out, labeled a squatter or deadbeat, and evicted. In most White Houses, policy and action flow down, with staff trying to implement what the president wants—or, at the very least, what the chief of staff says the president wants. In the Trump White House, policy making, from the very first instance of Bannon’s immigration EO, [executive order] flowed up. It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself (a result that was often helped along with the suggestion that he had in fact already had the thought).Wolff, with his title, and content, offers a wonderful Game of Thrones image. But there are plenty more that could easily apply. The Producers is one that he mentions, a particularly apt metaphor, given that it seemed clear to many of us, even during the campaign, that Trump, like Bialystock and Bloom, got into the presidential race for the money, and never really intended to win. This is confirmed in the book. Personally, I think Max Bialystock would have made a better president. Another scenario that Wolff mentions is the relationship of Thomas Cromwell to Henry VIII, wonderfully portrayed in the novel Wolf Hall (no relation), with Steve Bannon in the Cromwell role and you-know-who as the guy who made such a gigantic mess, because he simply had to have things his way. One could also consider House of Cards (the original), with all the plotting, back-stabbing, and hunger for power that made that series such fun to watch, although, after Bannon as Francis Urquart, the personnel parallels fade a bit. Alice in Wonderland gives us Trump as the single-minded Queen of Hearts. The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight might offer an image of ineptitude, if one ignores the fact that Trump has overseen the greatest looting by criminals of the national treasury in the nation’s history. For all his intellectual challenges Swamp Thing is a larger than life character with very little core, a made-for-Television president. [image] Swamp Thing and Bannon as Henry VIII and T. Cromwell - image from NY Magazine One of the things I most enjoyed was Wolff’s take on The Mooch. Anthony Scaramucci is the sort of Damon Runyon hanger-on one might expect to see in Guys and Dolls, or maybe a Batman flick, all puffery and attitude smeared over a core of ignorance, inflated by cartoonishly excessive self-confidence and corruption. From the description in Fire and Fury, it is not hard to imagine him in a too-wide pin-striped suit, shoulder-padded, sporting excessive pancake makeup, swinging a pocket watch from a chain, and laughing uncontrollably as he kicks some poor shmo that his minions are holding down for him, because he was a few dollars short on his protection payment. There are some things missing from the book, of course. There is not the sort of detailed biographical material better found in an actual biography. Forget seeing an autobiography. Anything Trump truly wrote would probably be close to an actual choose-your-own-adventure kid book, given his inability to remain focused for more than a few minutes. There is not a lot about serious international threats, with one exception. In a press conference at his Bedminster, NJ property: “His staff had not prepared him for this, but, in apparent relief that he could digress from the opioid discussion, as well as sudden satisfaction at the opportunity to address this nagging problem, he ventured out, in language that he’d repeated often in private—as he repeated everything often—to the precipice of an international crisis.Thus an increased concern about the danger of someone implementing the launch codes in a fit of pique or confusion. A fair bit of that intercontinental exchange of verbal ordnance occurred after the book was written, most notably the “My Button is bigger than your Button” lunacy. There is little discussion, although it gets a mention, of the potential implications of Trump’s autocratic leanings. The telling of the tale is much more about what has already happened as opposed to what might. It was during Trump’s early intelligence briefings, held soon after he captured the nomination, that alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in third-party information. Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost phobic about having formal demands on his attention. He stonewalled every written page and balked at every explanation. “He’s a guy who really hated school,” said Bannon. “And he’s not going to start liking it now.”This is not a book about policy. It is portrait of a White House as a theater of political warfare, a candidate who never really wanted or expected to be president and a president who is not only completely out of his depth, but who shows not only no capacity, but no interest in learning to swim. Even the people who work for him see him as unintelligent, narcissistic, incurious, and lazy. They even suggest he is losing his grip on reality, presuming he ever had one. It is certainly entertaining, the bits about Trump’s TV addiction, how he manages to cover his bald pate, and his pettiness about not wanting the cleaning staff to pick up his clothes from the floor. I mean, really, is he ashamed of being seen as a slob? Eating burgers in bed in front of the TV will probably gain him more support than criticism. I mean, even I can get on board with that, and I do not have a kind view of the man. But the more serious element is his mental fitness, and the danger this presents to us all. [image] image from Wolff’s Twitter feed, citing the Hollywood Reporter There is zero chance that the Republican Party will allow their sitting president, however damaged or corrupt he is, to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment. The best chance for his leaving office is for him to suffer a serious physical health crisis, which might force him to resign. As an older, overweight, out of shape man, this is not far-fetched. Even with a Democratically controlled Congress in January 2019, there is no guarantee that the Senate would come up with the sixty-seven votes needed to convict. The significance of this is that until Donald John Trump is removed from the presidency, by impeachment, ill-health, death, or being voted out of office in 2020, we are all at risk. Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury is an air-raid siren warning us all of peril, real and potential. (Wolff Hell?) It is must-read material for every American. When the GOP stands in the way of investigations into the administration, they are supporting a president who is unable to function at the needed level, a president who is uninterested in the details of governance, a president who is not in control of himself, a president who places not only himself, but the nation, and the entire world at risk. You need to know what they are protecting. It doesn’t take a stable genius to know that you should be afraid, very afraid. As Dubyah said, “That’s some weird shit.” Published – January 9, 2018 Review Posted – January 12, 2018 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. Then in Summer 2021 they decreed that external links would not longer be allowed in comments, where I used to put the review overage. So I have included the entirety of the review, including EXTRA STUFF, on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! [image] [image] [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 07, 2018
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Jan 11, 2018
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Jan 10, 2018
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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4.16
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it was amazing
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Aug 06, 2022
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Aug 10, 2022
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4.09
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it was amazing
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Dec 27, 2021
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Dec 27, 2021
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4.39
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really liked it
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Sep 27, 2021
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Sep 29, 2021
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4.22
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Jul 02, 2021
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Jul 02, 2021
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4.17
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it was amazing
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Nov 06, 2020
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Oct 02, 2020
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3.82
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it was amazing
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Sep 05, 2020
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Sep 05, 2020
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3.97
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it was amazing
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Feb 24, 2020
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Feb 24, 2020
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4.16
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it was amazing
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Feb 11, 2020
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Feb 10, 2020
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||||||
3.93
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liked it
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Dec 29, 2019
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Dec 25, 2019
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||||||
4.35
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it was amazing
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Dec 14, 2019
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Nov 02, 2019
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3.41
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really liked it
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May 05, 2019
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May 04, 2019
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4.14
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really liked it
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Mar 25, 2019
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Feb 13, 2019
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4.23
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it was amazing
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Feb 08, 2019
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Jan 26, 2019
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3.87
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really liked it
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Sep 18, 2018
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Sep 18, 2018
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3.68
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it was ok
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Oct 30, 2018
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Aug 30, 2018
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4.10
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it was amazing
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Aug 06, 2018
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Aug 06, 2018
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4.25
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really liked it
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May 14, 2018
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May 14, 2018
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4.17
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it was amazing
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Mar 20, 2018
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Mar 01, 2018
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3.88
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really liked it
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Feb 20, 2018
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Feb 20, 2018
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3.44
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it was amazing
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Jan 11, 2018
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Jan 10, 2018
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